Please click on the two petitions and the letter campaign that are on the top of the right-column. These are paper petitions which are tabled in parliament, not an electronic one given Canadian parliament doesn't accept electronic petitions.
We need basic property rights protected first.
on
A New Kind of OS
·
· Score: 1
Before we can dream of software such as you describe, we need to have our property rights fully protected for our hardware. This means that it must be our choice, not any third party, what software is installed on our hardware.
Recognized "BadWare" is not the largest problem, with many governments creating laws that ensure that the owners of computers aren't allowed to decide what software runs on their hardware.
It seems to me that Bruce is trying to take on too much. It's a problem people fall victim to who are self-motivated to solve some of the harder problems.
I see the change as a good thing -- if Bruce can keep the personal finances going well to have party-time Sourcelabs and part-time focused advocacy, then this is great! I've met Bruce in the past, and have seen him present a number of times, and am glad that he is putting a priority on some of the advocacy work. Sometimes organizations will come with you, and sometimes they will not, and that is fine.
TPM's applied to hardware (that disable the rights of owners to choose our own software), the tied selling of digital content to devices with TPMs applied to them (contrary to anti-trust/competition legislation - you can combine these two and call them "DRM" if you must) , and software patents are three policy areas I also have as a personal priority. This year I was asked to become the Policy Coordinator of CLUE: The Canadian Association for Open Source. As we grow our membership I will be finding out if this group wants to fund me to travel across Canada and elsewhere to deal with these problem policy areas, or whether they will want their association to have different priorities. My hope is the former, but otherwise I will be looking for a way to fund my advocacy work in other ways.
Many of the comments echo a common theme: It is our hardware, not the manufacturers, and they have no business using digital keys to lock us out of our own property.
The http://digital-copyright.ca/ will be helping people to find their candidates as well as other people who are interested in these areas of policy.
While the SonyBMG RootKit scandal that the current Government wishes to legally protect won't be as well known as the Sponsorship Scandal, we should still do what we can to expose the problems.
It is very important that people speak out, otherwise no matter how many new books are authored the government will listen to the chicken little "sky is falling" crisis manufactured by the recording, motion picture, and "software manufacturing" industries.
I would prefer the Music Download Service Providers of America that are going to by definition be far less intrusive on our lives than the Digital Rights Management Providers of America. At least with the music industry I can just opt-out and not have it affect any of my life.
There is a lot of misguided support for DRM in the music industry based on their entire lack of knowledge of how DRM works. DRM is a far greater threat to musicians AND their labels (major or otherwise) than any amount of copyright infringement.
I consider the lack of major label music to be a feature, not a bug. In 2000 I started my boycott of the major labels who have been spending their time trying to re-intermediate the Internet when I believe the end-to-end dis-intermediation is in fact the most important feature of new media. I won't pay money to people who are trying to do such harm to what I believe to be one of the most important enhancements to democratic societies in my lifetime.
I only purchase from independent labels, and then most often those who deliberately authorize their work to be shareable via a Creative Commons license. My favorite label is Fading Ways Music in Toronto who had signed up with Mindawn earlier in the month.
Anyone wanting to learn what is happening in Canada in this area of law should go to the Digital Copyright Canada forum. There are a number of misconceptions in the comments to this SlashDot article, including not recognizing just how close we are to getting US-DMCA-style legislation in Canada.
Please sign our *PAPER* petition, and coordinate with us to contact your MP and other policy makers.
Signing a web petition will not change the views of parliamentarians, but the paper petition we are organizing will be noticed. Please print it out, sign it, and mail it in to us. You may want to bring this to parliamentarians and offer to discuss it with them.
Different method of contact influence politicians differently. Email is the lest, because it is the easiest. Moving upward is a FAX, a SNAIL mail letter, a phone call, and then a fact-to-face meeting. The DCC site has per-riding discussion areas you can use to organize groups in your riding to meet with an MP.
Copyright law is as bad as tax law. When you receive music for private use, that is covered by the Private Copying regime in our copyright act.
When you send (upload) music, or when you exchange anything that is not music (like movies), this is not covered and thus what you are doing is copyright infringement under the copyright act.
Many people misinterpreted the recent federal court decision with CRIA vs 29 music "sharing" Canadians. As I wrote in a longer article earlier today:
There has been much hype about a recent court case involving Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA), with the recording industry invalidly claiming there is a hole in the copyright act. If you read the decision by the Honourable Mr. Justice von Finkenstein you will note that there is no hole in the copyright act, but if there is one it is the private copying regime which CRIA asked for in the first place.
If CRIA had offered any evidence of unauthorized music uploading, a basic requirement in a music copyright case in Canada, then they would likely have won the case. The recording industry made "downloading" legal, they don't need a "making available" right (which the industry would likely abuse to stop musicians from distributing their own work, creating additional layers of authorization requirements), and they didn't provide evidence of "uploading". The failure of CRIA in this case is entirely the fault of CRIA, and not a hole in the copyright act.
Why does the (claimed) size of SOCAN matter when they are wrong? As a creator I believe that fellow creators should get paid when they are due, but what SOCAN is asking for is not due to them at all.
Rather than paying a mandatory levy on blank media, those customers that wish simplified access to and the ability to "share" music outside of their home with their friends should (along with their friends) subscribe to appropriate collectives and pay a yearly fee to do so. This would, for instance, authorize non-commercial P2P distribution of the most standards compliant version of a file (standard file formats like MPEG/MP3, OGG, etc, rather than non-standard DRM files). This proposal was also promoted by EFF in the USA, and Canada has a head-start in that many of the required collectives are already formed if only they modernized their thinking.
The collectives have not yet offered this obvious option. They have gone to great lengths to avoid taking the obvious easy route, including trying to create a mandatory levy on ISPs which the Supreme Court recently rejected.
While the recording industry continues to claim that Internet users are infringing their rights it should be remembered that the ball has always been in their court to remedy the problem. No legislative changes are required for them to move forward with modern business models, and end the "cold war" they started with music fans.
I believe that any 'hardware assist' for communications, whether it be eye-glasses, VCR's, or personal computers, must be under the control of the citizen and not a third party. I believe that being in control of these tools for lawful purposes is part of the ownership rights associated with these tools, and consider the revoking of this control to be a form of theft.
In Canada the private copying regime applies to any private uses of music, including receiving the music from the Internet unauthorized by the copyright holder. It does not matter whether you own an original copy or not. In fact, without the private copying regime it is believed to be illegal for you to transfer the music to another medium/etc.
If CRIA had offered any evidence of unauthorized music uploading, a basic requirement in a music copyright case in Canada, then they would likely have won the case. The recording industry made "downloading" legal, they don't need a "making available" right (which the industry would likely abuse to stop musicians from distributing their own work, creating additional layers of authorization requirements), and they didn't provide evidence of "uploading". The failure of CRIA in this case is entirely the fault of CRIA, and not a hole in the copyright act.
If you are writing letters to MPs about digital copyright reform, please join the Digital Copyright Canada forum so that we can pool resources. If we all work together, we can ensure that Canadian policy on this is sane.
It is you that needs to read the NDP reply to the questions. The platform did not speak about this issue at all, but their reply did directly.
The NDP and the Bloc gave strong support for WIPO ratification and importing the USA DMCA. The Liberals did not offer that support, the Greens opposed it, and the Conservatives offered no reply at all.
If you are an NDP supporter than read their reply, and start to talk to fellow party members to ensure they get educated on this. Currently the NDP look anti-technology, anti-Internet.
I do not share this interpretation of Sarmite Bulte's words.
I was subjected to a speech from her at the Rethinking Copyright conference, and checked my interpretation with a number of other people there (some lawyers or law students, some other laypersons like myself). We all came to the same conclusion that she didn't understand technology law, and didn't separate many-to-many mediums of communication like the Internet to one-to-many broadcast media of the past.
Since you seem to have been able to reach her, try again with a few additional questions:
Why did she not respond to the questions from the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC)? If she wanted to prove her knowledge on technology law matters, it would seem extremely important for her to respond to the questions from a technology law clinic made up of law professors and law students specialized on technology
Is she aware of commons-based peer production and peer distributions such as those discussed around Creative Commons and Free/Libre and Open Source Software?
Has she read any of US law professor Lawrence Lessig's books on this topic, including and especially the most recent "Free Culture". Where does she agree and disagree with his understanding of technology law issues, given her recommendations reflect a very different belief system around technology law.
Whether elected or not, will she be willing to talk to representatives of CIPPIC and participants in the Digital Copyright Canada forum to find out why we are so concerned? Why has she thus far seemed uninterested in our input?
Be careful in what you are interpreting Sarmite to have said. She is not a technology law or technology aware person. She is not someone who would recognize that legal protection for DRM (TPM/RMI combination) is in fact a considerable regulation of technology.
She also seems unaware of the fact that proposals to tax educational use of the Internet are an exemption of copyright where the intentions of the copyright holders are ignored and instead a royalty-collective society receives what amounts to "a tax on the new to protect the old".
Ask her why after those 700 submissions, 650 which were generated by the Canada-DMCA-Opponents community (now http://digital-copyright.ca ), why none of us were invited to speak before the committee? I was invited by Industry committee to speak on a different bill, I believe partly because Heritage committee was ignoring our community after many submissions and many offers to speak with individual members.
I live and work in Ottawa, and have offered to do one-on-one or committee-wide sessions. The offers still stand, and hopefully the new Heritage committee will take me up on that offer.
BTW: If this is an area of policy you are interested in, please join the Digital Copyright Canada forum and help us move this policy/education forward.
What I wrote when I helped launch the campaign was the following:
There are those who say that this election is about health care, taxes, education and other such priorities. The policy areas we wish to discuss on http://digital-copyright.ca such as Patents, Copyrights, and Trademarks (PCTs) touch very deeply on these areas important to Canadians. You can't talk about health care without talking about pharmaceutical patents and research grants, and our alternative collaborative methods of innovation. You can't talk about taxes without talking about levies being applied to various media (such as blank CDs, and possibly the Internet itself in the future) being used to tax new creativity to fund the legacy content industries. You can't talk about education without talking about the worldwide collaborative creation of educational materials, and the importance of the royalty-free Internet to students able to research topics to a depth previously not possible.
I forgot to mention Chapter 1 of the Auditor General's report on Government on-line which represents far more government waste than Chapter 3 (sponsorship program) that people are upset about. We also hear people ranting about the gun registry, which was also a failed ICT project.
The issue isn't the importance of what we are trying to bring forward, but the lack of adequate media attention to educate people as to the connections between technology issues and all those things which they directly care about.
I think we should be proud that we are causing them to notice us during the election. We need to push harder, but we have a good start.
In the 2001 consultations we easily generated 650 of the 700 responses received. I'm hoping to get an even larger number of people involved during the election asking questions during all candidates debates and so-on.
We also have a petition for users rights that we will be presenting to the new parliament. Currently we have between 100 and 200 signatures, and I really want that to be over a 1000! If 650 people will write a letter to government bureaucrats to signify they don't want a DMCA in Canada, we should be able to get over 1000 people telling parliament directly!
Note: The recording industry claims that they asked for the levy as a stop-gap before they got Legal protection for DRM. They also more recently claimed that they lost a court case (BMG CANADA INC. vs. John and Jane doe) claiming that there is a "hole in the copyright act". There is no hole in the copyright act, unless you count the blank media levy and their entire lack of evidence of copyright infringement.
I don't see the point of the statistic. So what if people are downloading MP3's.
First, because of the Private Copying regime it is legal in Canada -- regardless of the source of the music -- bought and paid for by the levy all us Canadians pay on blank media.
Second, many musicians actually AUTHORIZE the distribution of their music by P2P and other systems. I went to a CD launch in Toronto last month for a CD that is released under a Creative Commons license.
The presumption that these 60% of Canadian secondary students are doing something illegal is completely false.
Note: IANAL, but I hang around with many and go to conferences like Rethinking Copyright to debate these issues with lawyers and fellow copyright reformers in Canada.
Slashdot Mirror
Please click on the two petitions and the letter campaign that are on the top of the right-column. These are paper petitions which are tabled in parliament, not an electronic one given Canadian parliament doesn't accept electronic petitions.
Before we can dream of software such as you describe, we need to have our property rights fully protected for our hardware. This means that it must be our choice, not any third party, what software is installed on our hardware.
t ml
Recognized "BadWare" is not the largest problem, with many governments creating laws that ensure that the owners of computers aren't allowed to decide what software runs on their hardware.
Protecting property rights in a digital world
http://www.flora.ca/documents/digital-ownership.h
I see the change as a good thing -- if Bruce can keep the personal finances going well to have party-time Sourcelabs and part-time focused advocacy, then this is great! I've met Bruce in the past, and have seen him present a number of times, and am glad that he is putting a priority on some of the advocacy work. Sometimes organizations will come with you, and sometimes they will not, and that is fine.
TPM's applied to hardware (that disable the rights of owners to choose our own software), the tied selling of digital content to devices with TPMs applied to them (contrary to anti-trust/competition legislation - you can combine these two and call them "DRM" if you must) , and software patents are three policy areas I also have as a personal priority. This year I was asked to become the Policy Coordinator of CLUE: The Canadian Association for Open Source. As we grow our membership I will be finding out if this group wants to fund me to travel across Canada and elsewhere to deal with these problem policy areas, or whether they will want their association to have different priorities. My hope is the former, but otherwise I will be looking for a way to fund my advocacy work in other ways.
If you are a Canadian you can help send this message to parliament by signing our Petition to protect Information Technology property rights.
Today I posted an article to the website of CLUE: The Canadian Association for Open Source, titled "Whose hardware is it anyway?" (Copy on the Digital Copyright Canada forum).
The http://digital-copyright.ca/ will be helping people to find their candidates as well as other people who are interested in these areas of policy.
While the SonyBMG RootKit scandal that the current Government wishes to legally protect won't be as well known as the Sponsorship Scandal, we should still do what we can to expose the problems.
I would just like to remind Canadians about http://killbillc60.ca/ and specifically the page http://www.digital-copyright.ca/billc60/do_somethi ng.shtml which offers suggestions on what people can do.
It is very important that people speak out, otherwise no matter how many new books are authored the government will listen to the chicken little "sky is falling" crisis manufactured by the recording, motion picture, and "software manufacturing" industries.
I would prefer the Music Download Service Providers of America that are going to by definition be far less intrusive on our lives than the Digital Rights Management Providers of America. At least with the music industry I can just opt-out and not have it affect any of my life.
There is a lot of misguided support for DRM in the music industry based on their entire lack of knowledge of how DRM works. DRM is a far greater threat to musicians AND their labels (major or otherwise) than any amount of copyright infringement.
I, Copyright Cop! - Who controls the digital security guards?
I consider the lack of major label music to be a feature, not a bug. In 2000 I started my boycott of the major labels who have been spending their time trying to re-intermediate the Internet when I believe the end-to-end dis-intermediation is in fact the most important feature of new media. I won't pay money to people who are trying to do such harm to what I believe to be one of the most important enhancements to democratic societies in my lifetime.
I only purchase from independent labels, and then most often those who deliberately authorize their work to be shareable via a Creative Commons license. My favorite label is Fading Ways Music in Toronto who had signed up with Mindawn earlier in the month.
See also: Creative Commons Year in review..
Anyone wanting to learn what is happening in Canada in this area of law should go to the Digital Copyright Canada forum. There are a number of misconceptions in the comments to this SlashDot article, including not recognizing just how close we are to getting US-DMCA-style legislation in Canada.
Please sign our *PAPER* petition, and coordinate with us to contact your MP and other policy makers.
Digital Copyright Canada has a Petition for Users' Rights as well as BLOGS, mailing lists, and other materials related to this area of law in Canada.
Signing a web petition will not change the views of parliamentarians, but the paper petition we are organizing will be noticed. Please print it out, sign it, and mail it in to us. You may want to bring this to parliamentarians and offer to discuss it with them.
Different method of contact influence politicians differently. Email is the lest, because it is the easiest. Moving upward is a FAX, a SNAIL mail letter, a phone call, and then a fact-to-face meeting. The DCC site has per-riding discussion areas you can use to organize groups in your riding to meet with an MP.
The only way that Canada will not get a DMCA, something pushed for by the all-party Heritage Committee (the committee reviewing the copyright act), is if Canadians speak clearly and loudly against it. The group to work with to do that currently is the Digital Copyright Canada forum.
When you send (upload) music, or when you exchange anything that is not music (like movies), this is not covered and thus what you are doing is copyright infringement under the copyright act.
Many people misinterpreted the recent federal court decision with CRIA vs 29 music "sharing" Canadians. As I wrote in a longer article earlier today:
From an article written earlier today:
I did a report for Industry Canada on A Review of Software Patent Issues.
There are also discussions of patents on the Digital Copyright Canada forum.
Please read about the private copying regime. As to the legality of music "sharing", there is much misinformation about this as I wrote in a larger article earlier today.
If you are writing letters to MPs about digital copyright reform, please join the Digital Copyright Canada forum so that we can pool resources. If we all work together, we can ensure that Canadian policy on this is sane.
It is you that needs to read the NDP reply to the questions. The platform did not speak about this issue at all, but their reply did directly.
The NDP and the Bloc gave strong support for WIPO ratification and importing the USA DMCA. The Liberals did not offer that support, the Greens opposed it, and the Conservatives offered no reply at all.
If you are an NDP supporter than read their reply, and start to talk to fellow party members to ensure they get educated on this. Currently the NDP look anti-technology, anti-Internet.
I do not share this interpretation of Sarmite Bulte's words.
I was subjected to a speech from her at the Rethinking Copyright conference, and checked my interpretation with a number of other people there (some lawyers or law students, some other laypersons like myself). We all came to the same conclusion that she didn't understand technology law, and didn't separate many-to-many mediums of communication like the Internet to one-to-many broadcast media of the past.
Since you seem to have been able to reach her, try again with a few additional questions:
Be careful in what you are interpreting Sarmite to have said. She is not a technology law or technology aware person. She is not someone who would recognize that legal protection for DRM (TPM/RMI combination) is in fact a considerable regulation of technology.
She also seems unaware of the fact that proposals to tax educational use of the Internet are an exemption of copyright where the intentions of the copyright holders are ignored and instead a royalty-collective society receives what amounts to "a tax on the new to protect the old".
Ask her why after those 700 submissions, 650 which were generated by the Canada-DMCA-Opponents community (now http://digital-copyright.ca ), why none of us were invited to speak before the committee? I was invited by Industry committee to speak on a different bill, I believe partly because Heritage committee was ignoring our community after many submissions and many offers to speak with individual members.
I live and work in Ottawa, and have offered to do one-on-one or committee-wide sessions. The offers still stand, and hopefully the new Heritage committee will take me up on that offer.
BTW: If this is an area of policy you are interested in, please join the Digital Copyright Canada forum and help us move this policy/education forward.
You may also want to use the NDP topic area on the Digital Copyright Canada forum to work together with other people from that party.
I forgot to mention Chapter 1 of the Auditor General's report on Government on-line which represents far more government waste than Chapter 3 (sponsorship program) that people are upset about. We also hear people ranting about the gun registry, which was also a failed ICT project.
The issue isn't the importance of what we are trying to bring forward, but the lack of adequate media attention to educate people as to the connections between technology issues and all those things which they directly care about.
We look forward to commentary on the NDP and the Bloc Québécois (Google Translation).
Missing at this point from the major parties is the reply from the Conservative party.
I think we should be proud that we are causing them to notice us during the election. We need to push harder, but we have a good start.
In the 2001 consultations we easily generated 650 of the 700 responses received. I'm hoping to get an even larger number of people involved during the election asking questions during all candidates debates and so-on.
We also have a petition for users rights that we will be presenting to the new parliament. Currently we have between 100 and 200 signatures, and I really want that to be over a 1000! If 650 people will write a letter to government bureaucrats to signify they don't want a DMCA in Canada, we should be able to get over 1000 people telling parliament directly!
Note: The recording industry claims that they asked for the levy as a stop-gap before they got Legal protection for DRM. They also more recently claimed that they lost a court case (BMG CANADA INC. vs. John and Jane doe) claiming that there is a "hole in the copyright act". There is no hole in the copyright act, unless you count the blank media levy and their entire lack of evidence of copyright infringement.
See: The Canadian File-sharing Legal Information Network (CanFLI) for more information on that case.
I don't see the point of the statistic. So what if people are downloading MP3's.
First, because of the Private Copying regime it is legal in Canada -- regardless of the source of the music -- bought and paid for by the levy all us Canadians pay on blank media.
Second, many musicians actually AUTHORIZE the distribution of their music by P2P and other systems. I went to a CD launch in Toronto last month for a CD that is released under a Creative Commons license.
The presumption that these 60% of Canadian secondary students are doing something illegal is completely false.
Note: IANAL, but I hang around with many and go to conferences like Rethinking Copyright to debate these issues with lawyers and fellow copyright reformers in Canada.