News & Notes on Bill C-61 (AKA Canadian DMCA)

London Ontario's David Canton has written a column in today's London Free Press on Bill C-61. As Michael Geist was quick to point out, David minces no words in describing his opinion of the proposed legislation:

"...the bill is flawed and should not be passed in its current state..."

"Canada had an opportunity to set an example for what 21st-century copyright should be but, instead, has subscribed to the traditional views of certain entertainment industry proponents."

You can read the full column here.

Michael Geist has provided links and analysis to one of the versions of the official Liberal response to constituent concerns, Jame's Bow's open letter to Industry Minister Prentice, and a few other notable presentations and opinions on the matter.

It's interesting to see the big issues coming forward, most eloquently put by Mr. Bow:

"Our justice system demands that we be considered innocent until proven guilty. It is shameful to have companies assume that because we want the ability to format shift or time shift or cut and paste, that we will misuse it."

While he cites several examples (some of which are actually incorrect) of format shifting that would become illegal under this bill, it's this statement that rings the most true and is the absolute log-line of the problems with this bill:

"Furthermore, the lack of protections offered by this bill to quote from, parody or criticize copyrighted material disturb me... The new legislation makes it much more difficult to quote supporting material in academic essays... This is a significant imposition on academic freedom in this country, and it could potentially restrict our freedom of speech.

As you run for a party which has argued in favour of personal property rights, I’m surprised that you no longer see fit to protect the right of Canadians to watch what they want, when they want, and how they want after they have legally purchased their song, video or software."

Again, the full letter can be found here:

Michael Geist - The Canadian DMCA: A Betrayal

Michael Geist - The Canadian DMCA: A Betrayal

Brlliant

ArsTechnica examines "Made-In-Canada DMCA"

Ars Technica reviews the new Canadian Copyright Act (Bill C-61) and comes back with a distressing, albeit not entirely surprising analysis.

The review can be found here

What's great about the review is that although it most definitely has a point-of-view (e.g. "...those pesky details... make even the "consumer-friendly" parts of the bill a bit less friendly."), the approach they've taken is to be very quiet on the judgement calls. Focusing more on the on-the-ground realities.

The other point that this article brings home is that while this bill is, in part, about curbing intellectual property theft by providing steep provisions for both preventative deterrents and punitive restitution of infringement, the bulk of the creator protections revolves around criminalizing backups of personal DVDs and CDs (movies, software and music) and criminalizing circumvention techniques that include dvd "backup" software, unlocking cellphones, and the like. The article explains that under the new law, it would be:

"...illegal to circumvent DRM [digital rights management] or to provide circumvention services or devices... In addition, rightsholders can go after those who bypass or break DRM schemes, giving them more ability to tie up content and devices simply by adding a bit of encryption."

What this means is that Sony, for instance, is free to encode their movies so that they'll only play on their DVD players, and I as a consumer must go and buy a Sony DVD player to make it play, or purchase the movie in another format (at full price) to play on a different device. If you think this won't happen, it already has. Apple's fairplay DRM scheme ensures that music purchased through the Apple store will ONLY play back on apple devices at its original quality (you can burn it to a CD and then re-rip it, but it sounds awful).

Anti-circumvention means that I can't take my DVD collection and rip it to my iPod. It also means I can't take music CDs with DRM and rip them to my iTunes. Media and content portability is completely criminalized if the creators so wish it.

My other big concern (and it is a big one) is what this will do to the homebrew community in Canada. For an explanation of why this is important, check out my prior blog post on Homebrew.

As to what can be done, I'm not sure. For now, you can look at the Facebook group for Fair Copyright in Canada, or keep checking Michael Geist's Blog. Of course you can always look at the resources listed on Professor Geist's "What you can do" posting.

Michael Geist | 10 More Questions for Industry Minister Prentice

Michael Geist writes today:

Last fall, as Industry Minister Jim Prentice was preparing to introduce new copyright legislation, I wrote an article in the Hill Times posing ten questions to Prentice about the forthcoming bill. Many of the questions - which focused on issues such as flexibility in implementing international copyright treaties, concern about the bill from the privacy community, fears about the impact of the law on security research, and doubts about the constitutionality of the proposal - remain unanswered. Yet the six-month copyright delay has raised many more questions, including the following ten, which appear in this week's Hill Times:

These are hard-hitting, though-provoking questions. You can read them in detail here: Link

Canadian Copyright, From The Horse's... Pen.

h/t to Michael Geist - GREAT op-ed essay on Canadian copyright reform in today's Globe and Mail entitled Who Needs Copyright, Anyway?. Rather than being written by a member of the government, or a lawyer, or even a professor (sorry Dr. Geist), it's written by John Degen, head of PWAC - the Professional Writers Association of Canada.

"The panic merchants who continue to try to sell the idea of an epic struggle for control of our culture have an agenda functionally unrelated to how we all continue to interact with that culture. For the most part, they just want cultural product to be free - not free as [Lawrence] Lessig defined it, as in free of unreasonable access-constraints; but free as in we shouldn't have to pay for it. Name something we don't pay for, one way or another. We'll learn, and adjust."

It takes into account Lessig's Free (as in beer) vs Free (as in speech) concept, and delightfully brings it home, touching on fair use, piracy, and even the privacy fight! All in all, truly a must-read for those interested in these matters, both in Canada and abroad.

Link to G&M essay

Ars Book Review: "The Pirate's Dilemma"

Referring back to my post about the merits of piracy ArsTechnica is running a book review on former UK Pirate DJ Matthew Mason's The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism. Mason argues, among other things that the US was largely founded on piracy, and not just of the Hollywood variety:

"During the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution, the Founding Fathers pursued a policy of counterfeiting European inventions, ignoring global patents, and stealing intellectual property wholesale."

...Americans were so known for piracy that they were eventually branded Yankees, from the Dutch "Janke," slang for a pirate.

The article takes a very centrist perspective on the matter, and follows up with an interview of Mason. One of the more interesting ideas put forward is a likening of the eponymous "Pirate's Dilemma" to the "Prisoner's Dilemma" from AI game theory. A paradox of market interests emerges and a grid begins to form, one where a circumstance of limited choice emerges and pirates/industry now move inside this artifice according to prescribed actions. It's not only a paradox, it's mostly a zero-sum effort. Mason suggests that the antidote is to have industry play against the pirates in the market (where they're making money) as opposed to the courts (where they're spending money and losing valuable goodwill and brand equity).

ArsTechnica balances this carefully, weighing the greater good against the interests of private enterprise through the lens of a Pirate's Dilemma:

...While piracy may be good for those who don't have to pay for something, it's less immediately clear how it might benefit the broader economy. And how could it help the very companies who are being hurt by it? Here is Mason's answer, one worth quoting at length.

By short-circuiting conventional channels and red tape, pirates can deliver new materials, formats, and business models to audiences who want them. Canal Street moves faster than Wall Street. Piracy transforms the markets it operates in, changing the way distribution works and forcing companies to be more competitive and innovative. Pirates don't just defend the public domain from corporate control; they also force big business and government to deliver what we want, when we want it.

It's an argument worth considering. Would we have iTunes, eMusic, Amie Street, and the Amazon digital music store without the pressure brought by the pirates? It's hard to say definitively, but... how much innovation would the labels have allowed without... KaZaA, Gnutella, and especially the original Napster?

As we begin to see open source content become a viable reality, and as pirate-like punk DIY finds an increasingly welcoming marketplace, the labels and the studios will increasingly have to compete, not with the disruptive influence of free pirate offerings, but with free, premium content operating under different monetizing models. I wonder if they'll be willing to pay to copy those models once the prove viable, or will they simply take them and use them for free?

Link to ArsTechnica Review
Book @ Amazon: The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism

Copyright Rumours Swirling Again

h/t to David Canton via Twitter...

Michael Geist is indicating that the Canadian copyright reform measures that the Conservative government has been advancing is again in play. There are many points at issue here, including:

• A lack of transparency in the legal process that has the appearance of cronyism and capitulation to special interest (including the US government and US industry);


• A degree of hypocrisy on the part of the Conservatives (by refusing to 'ratify' the WIPO treaty as per Canadian law);


• A serious retraction of fair use that we already enjoy as Canadians (e.g. copying a CD to iTunes would become an infraction);


• Virtually no expansion of fair use to cover academic and personal use (e.g. recording a show for later viewing on a DVR or VCR is currently an infraction, and there is no provision in the 'reform' plans to provide relief for this);


• A copyright law that is heavily tilted in favour of private interest and industry, rather than truly fair use policy for all Canadians.

It's this last issue that is the log line for me... Overly protectionist copyright law has the net effect of harming society and industry as it seeks to restrict (artificially) the flow of information and innovation. One need look no further than Orson Scott Card's commentary on the J.K. Rowling copyright suit to see a prime illustration of this point.

At the end of the day, fair use is not about piracy (although apparently piracy has its merits too). Rather, fair use is about consumer choice, consumer rights, and protection from an industry that thrives on re-selling (sorry, licensing), the same materials over and over again, with no substantive difference beyond format.

The Canadian government has a responsibility to both citizens and industry. Dr. Geist has laid out a very clear, objective, and ultimately fair method for achieving that balance. It's critical that the minority Conservative government recognizes this.

Link to Michael Geist's Blog

Open Source Movie

I've been wondering for a while what an open source movie would look like, and now I have my answer. Wreck-A-Movie, fresh from its creators' first mashed-up movie, Star Wreck. Slashdot has a great summary of the history of this site:

"These are the same guys who brought us Star Wreck, the most successful feature-length Internet-distributed film of all time. That film was made by 3,000 people, has been downloaded 8 million times, is under a Creative Commons by-nd-nc license, and made good money both through DVD sales and through an eventual deal with Universal."

The guys have been at it again, this time with "Iron Sky," a movie that tells the story of a group of Nazis that have been stuck on the dark side of the moon since having fled the planet in 1945. The trailer is viewable here:



For those unfamiliar, the Creative Commons licensing system provides a more forward-looking copyrighting structure, allowing some or all of a work to be designated for different levels of use, indicating whether, for instance, items from this blog could be republished by someone else for commercial purposes, or even whether I can embed a particular photo on Flickr.

More interesting to me, though is the way that these folks have applied OSS techniques to content creation. Making a movie is by its nature a massively collaborative process, and using tools such as these to construct both the collaboration and the end product is tricky business. For example, there are lists of "Tasks" made available on the site (including tasks I might specifically be interested in), and a series of shots that will require comments.

Shots, interestingly, aren't necessarily completed works, rather they're contributions. For instance, one shot that I followed was a discussion on the appropriate name for the US spacecraft that takes the mission to the Moon in 2018 and discovers the Nazis. Another provides ideas for gadgets the Nazis have developed in their isolated enclave.

All in all, there are some interesting learnings here, and it's an amazing, if not excruciatingly simple reflection of the creative collaborative process. While the trailer for IronSky exhibits some amateurish qualities, and lacks some of Hollywood's polish, it's still a massively successful effort.

Orson Scott Card blasts J.K. Rowling's Lawsuit

Oh Orson Scott, you're such a... er... Card.

Seriously tho, this is an interesting, if somewhat sideways take on the fair-use copyright troubles plaguing new media.

Card lays out (something like tongue-in-cheek) some of the similarities between the story in Ender's Game and in the Potter series: "A young kid growing up in an oppressive family situation suddenly learns that he is one of a special class of children with special abilities, who are to be educated in a remote training facility where student life is dominated by an intense game played by teams flying in midair, at which this kid turns out to be exceptionally talented and a natural leader." (And that's just to get started.)

Link to Slashdot article
Link to Orson Scott Card Commentary

Private Industry: 1 - General Consumers: 0

Michael Giest has blogged this story as has BoingBoing.

Personally, I find this very disturbing. From Boing Boing:

"The supposedly non-partisan Public Policy Forum is holding a major, one-sided IP symposium on Monday. Invited are the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, former head of the Canadian Motion Picture Industry Association, and other big-stick-swingers for American-style copyright disasters. But when copyright lobbyists discovered that noted copyright scholar Howard Knopf would appear on just one of the panels, they went berserk and pushed successfully to have Knopf removed, ensuring that dissenting voices would be minimized on the day.

I certainly understand that it's the prerogative of the Public Policy Forum as hosts of the panel discussion to invite those individuals that they wish; However, this move is in direct contradiction to their own policy and mission statement, which reads, in part:

"The Public Policy Forum's mission is to strive for excellence in government - to serve as a neutral, independent forum for open dialogue on public policy, and to encourage reform in public sector management."

Unfortunately, this decision to exclude a speaker who publicly planned to specifically speak on Canada's current policies on fair copyright, and moreover, planned to demonstrate where Canada had opportunities to improve its own standing in this regard, was bullied from the podium.

I'm not really surprised, just disappointed that a real debate seems unlikely. These actions on the part of both the other panelists and the PPF are endemic of the sort of one-sided bullying that has characterized so much of the net neutrality and fair copyright issue.

As an educator and a media producer myself, I'm deeply concerned with how my IP is used; However, with that in mind, I also want a free and open discussion and a debate that supports all sides of this issue, not one that can produce talking-points-inspired spin that can be fodder for pundits and news outlets alike.

Links:
Michael Geist
BoingBoing
Howard Knopf
Public Policy Forum