Richard Stallman came to Vancouver, and I upset him

Thursday, February 19th, 2009 Posted in Civil Liberties, Information Technology, Intellectual Property | 6 Comments »

Richard Stallman was in Vancouver two weeks ago.  He performed, if I may describe his lectures like that, three times; I caught the first.  I asked Stallman a question after it was over, and thoroughly annoyed him.  I know that ...

EU suggests reason and logic behind ACTA

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 Posted in Civil Liberties, Information Technology, Intellectual Property | No Comments »

I've just finished reading the ACTA Fact Sheet, updated November 2008.  Here is some preliminary information: ACTA is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The subtitle "Fact Sheet" is footnoted, "This fact sheet purports ...

Are there benefits to “piracy”?

Thursday, November 6th, 2008 Posted in Business Law, Information Technology, Intellectual Property, Video Games | 1 Comment »

The pro-copyright, pro-DMCA, anti-counterfeit lobby groups would have you believe that all unauthorized reproduction (and distribution), colloquially known (inaccurately) as piracy, is horrid for the industries concerned, and is destroying them.  They go so far as to call it theft, ...

Alternatives to C-61, part II

Thursday, August 28th, 2008 Posted in Information Technology, Intellectual Property | No Comments »

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:

Alternatives to C-61: Statutory concerns for the protection and encouragement of creative works

Sunday, August 24th, 2008 Posted in Information Technology, Intellectual Property | 1 Comment »

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 ...

Hedy Fry’s Copyright Balance

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 Posted in Intellectual Property, Privacy | No Comments »

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.  ...

The “Deliverance” of C-61 Begins

Thursday, June 19th, 2008 Posted in Information Technology, Intellectual Property | No Comments »

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 ...

RIAA and MPAA hijack the border (or someone like them)

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 Posted in Civil Liberties, Information Technology, Intellectual Property | No Comments »

Cyberion, at Tazzu, posted a link to the Vancouver Province story on the threatened border checks (ACTA) on the legitimacy of electronic media. (Cyberion's post) I had some rather strong feelings, and ranted the following: This is one of the nastiest ...

Why the RIAA should be subject to Judicial Review

Monday, March 24th, 2008 Posted in Information Technology, Intellectual Property | No Comments »

Nate Anderson of Ars Technica published a piece on March 11 entitled, "RIAA tells Ars: We're not hypocrites". Essentially it boils down to this: The RIAA's collective spin-off -- in some ways similar to SOCAN here -- is ...

Collective mens rea? Or a lack of musical supply…

Thursday, March 20th, 2008 Posted in Business Law, Intellectual Property | 1 Comment »

Ben Jones of TorrentFreak published an article a couple of weeks ago discussing the 2008 Digital Entertainment Survey in the U.K., in which it was revealed not only that so-called "piracy" is rampant, even among the generally non-criminal element. ...