weblawg.net: Information Society through the Prism of Law Costin on IP, IT, Media, and Business Law

Here’s the rest of that post:

GOALS

The goal of any legislation is to balance concerns of interested but competing parties, and to approach this balance, as much as possible, with a public interest bias.

The concerns were these: Read More…

Posted under Information Technology, Intellectual Property

I want to suggest an alternative paradigm to the statutory regime for creative works as intellectual property, a.k.a. copyright.  I’m not going to get into detailed explanations of the existing Copyleft and other alternative paradigms to copyright.  But I’m going to borrow from them, and from discussions I’ve had with industry players and legal theorists (lawyers and academics) to, I hope, open some discussion on what else can be done.

This is not meant to be a set of specific fixes to C-61.  Prof. Michael Geist has been doing an exceptional and detailed job of that on his blog at http://www.michaelgeist.ca.

Instead, these ideas presume us not already headed down C-61 Avenue, but at a fork where C-61 is one of the roads being touted.  It is not the only road currently available, in the sense that one can opt out and instead choose licensing options to circumvent copyright.  Rather, these ideas are ways to do something different from C-61 entirely, but that would still be a statutory avenue rather than the contractual private road of licensing.

Let me restate that analogy:

Read More…

Posted under Information Technology, Intellectual Property

The electoral district in which I live is called “Vancouver Centre.”  My elected representative is the Honourable Member of Parliament, Dr. Hedy Fry.  Dr. Fry is something of an activist; she has always been an outspoken representative of her constituents.  Generally, I like her.  I vote for her.

A fellow constituent of Vancouver Centre, Chuck LeDuc Diaz, runs a blog called Mad Analogy.  At his blog, he posted a letter he received from Dr. Fry in response to a letter he sent her informing her of his concerns regarding Bill C-61, An Act to Americanize Amend the Copyright Act.

Chuck’s post dealing with, and including, Dr. Fry’s letter:

http://www.madanalogy.com/2008/07/hedy-fry-on-c-61-canadian-dmca.html

Dr. Fry’s criticisms of C-61 are not shy:

This Bill does not serve either consumer or creator well.  It prescribes narrow, punitive solutions to a complex problem.  In fact the Bill could well have the effect of curbing the use of digital technology, to the extent that it becomes useless.  This would be a pity!  As well implementation of the measures in the Bill would be nearly impossible, unless one abandons all privacy rights or imposes locks on the digital technology that severely limits [sic] its application.  How to monetize digital technology to reward the creator and allow free and open use by the consumer is challenging.

Dr. Fry’s fears are correct,  I would like to assist her on one political point:  It would behoove her to trumpet Canada’s present privacy laws - leading examples on a global scale - of the protection of individual information rights vis-a-vis both government and (here’s where we really shine) corporations.  The potential damage to privacy rights not only brings us more in line with a U.S. capitalist-fundamentalist approach to privacy, it damages our international reputation, which has made us an ideal trading partner for European companies who cannot infringe their own national policies through trade.  In other words, European companies like to trade with us because our privacy laws make it easy for them to keep themselves clean by their own standards. Read More…

Posted under Intellectual Property, Privacy

Here we go… [UPDATED: Links added]

It’s been a week since the Minister of Information Industry, Jim Prentice, dropped a piano Bill C-61 on us. Thanks to Prof. Michael Geist, we had some warning: This bill would not be a brave surge forward into the 21st century for Canada, embracing the Information Age and showing the world that we lead in promoting innovation and civil liberties, that we have the wisdom to strike balance where others are stricken with fear, and that we anticipate rather than kowtow.

This bill is instead sycophantic obsequiousness to groups that should be politically and legally notwithstood according to any definition of Canadian sovereignty or democracy.

Our public interest groups (Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic - CIPPIC), private interest groups (Canadian Music Creators Coalition - CMCC), and even corporate lobbyists (the Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright - BCBC) have spoken, but it was to the U.S. Ambassador, the RIAA, the MPAA, and the other foreign interests that elected Members of Parliament Jim Prentice and Josee Verner listened.

If not for the environmental catastrophe that would be precipitated by tons of polycarbonate in open water, I would advocate dumping boatloads of blank CD-Rs and flas memory cards in Boston Harbour. Why should our laws be dictated by a government not elected by us? I think I’ve heard that before.

Anyway, I’m going to spend the next while continuing to sink my teeth into the meat of C-61 and will try to get specific in critiquing its shortcomings.

I’ll give you a taste of some detailed analysis, however: Read More…

Posted under Information Technology, Intellectual Property