Letter to Joy Smith re: Canadian Copyright Reform

7 December 2007 @ 4:40 am

Below is my letter to Joy Smith, M.P. for Kildonan-St. Paul, regarding the forthcoming copyright bill. It will be going in the mail tomorrow. I borrowed some elements from here and here. Please feel free to use any or all parts of the letter to write your own letter to your MP.

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7 December 2007

Ms. Joy Smith, M.P.
House of Commons
Parliament Buildings
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6

Dear Ms. Smith:

My name is Stephen Woodrow. I have lived in your riding for 23 years, and hold a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the University of Manitoba. I am writing to you let you know that I am deeply concerned about the forthcoming copyright reform bill announced in the most recent throne speech. I have two primary concerns regarding the forthcoming bill and the approach taken in bringing it before the House of Commons.

1. Openness and Consultation With Stakeholders and All Canadians
While the prospect of a copyright reform bill was announced in the throne speech, the government has since been uncommunicative about the contents of this bill. Despite growing public concern regarding the bill, the Minister of Industry has declined to discuss the issue with the CBC and other media outlets. I find this behavior unacceptable from a minister introducing legislation in the name of all Canadians.

Also, it is not apparent that any effort has been made to consult with the various stakeholders affected by copyright legislation, or to allow all Canadians to voice their opinion on this matter, as has typically occurred leading up to previous Canadian copyright reform proposals. This approach makes me very uneasy about the openness of our government to its citizens, as well as how accurately the forthcoming bill will reflect the interests and needs of all Canadians.

2. Ratification of World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaties
The Minister of Heritage has stated that they are working to bring Canadian copyright policy into conformance with WIPO treaties, and the forthcoming bill will presumably be the instrument for conformance. This concerns me for a number of reasons. First, the WIPO treaties proposed for ratification contain a number of provisions that would prevent Canadians from exercising their fair dealing rights in legitimate circumstances. Such provisions would have a chilling effect on research and criticism, stifle competition and innovation, and criminalize the behavior of ordinary, productive, and otherwise law-abiding Canadians. For these reasons alone, I believe these treaties should not be ratified.

Further, the United States has nearly ten years of experience in implementing the WIPO treaties through their Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This experience has shown that the DMCA restricts end-users rights and allows for abuse of DMCA provisions by monopolistic content owners, again to the detriment of user rights. The Supreme Court of Canada affirmed in a 2004 ruling that the balance of owners’ and users’ interests is an essential part of the Copyright Act. By ratifying the WIPO treaties through this forthcoming bill, the essential balance of owners’ and users’ rights would be severely upset.

Thank you for taking the time to read my letter. I sincerely hope that you and the other members of our government take action to increase the openness of the copyright reform process, consult all Canadians on this matter, and reject legislation that upsets Canada’s balanced approach to copyright. The freedom of Canadians to equitably create and enjoy the content that comprises our nation’s unique and cherished culture depends on it.

Would you be willing to meet with me and other members of your riding to discuss this further?

Sincerely,

Stephen Woodrow

Please consider writing your MP (paper is better than email if you can — it’s harder to ignore). This is the most important thing you can do.

Mailing Tips:

  • Mail your letter for free by sending it to Parliament. Be sure to include “M.P.” after their name on the envelope.
  • Use this tool to figure out who your MP is and their parliamentary address.
  • For what it’s worth, be sure to put your return address on the envelope — I’ve heard this can affect the priority of handling your mail based on whether or not you appear to be from the MP’s riding.

Once you’ve done this, consider another one of the 30 things you can do, as suggested by Michael Geist.

And stay informed. Join the facebook group or read Geist’s website for all the latest.

Edited to add additional note about return addresses in “Mailing Tips” above.

An image from some time ago

24 November 2007 @ 12:53 am


Freedom of Speech (by sτενεωooδroω)

My friend Timothy Dick made this image back in 2004 or 2005, when he was working in/near Seattle, I think. Similar to something we used to do in art class back in junior high, it started with finding a great image from National Geographic magazines of years gone by. Then you’d look for some advertising copy or another interesting phrase that would make for an interesting juxtaposition. Et voilà.

When Tim returned to Winnipeg, he had a number of these taped onto the door to his room, and was running out of space for them, which is how I ended up with this one — one of the best, in my opinion. Reflecting upon this image more recently, I find it even more powerful. The young, patriotic boy representing innocence and the uncompromising ideals of America’s fundamental rights, contrasted with the glued-on advertising copy, easily a statement from authorities and governments about the tenability of those fundamental rights when fighting a war on terror. I don’t know if this hit me back then, but it does now.

“is”less Facebook Status

21 November 2007 @ 1:56 am


"is"less Facebook Status (by sτενεωooδroω)

Since so many people have been asking me about my “is”less status on Facebook, I thought I’d share a little bit about the situation. My story isn’t really interesting in and of itself, but it does suggest exciting news for anyone who would prefer a verb other than “is”.

When I updated my status yesterday evening from home.php, it struck me as odd that the text box looked different — wider than normal. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that the “is” in “Steve is <insert status here>” was now in the textbox along with the rest of the status. It wasn’t highlighted, so if you typed in a status without paying attention, you might not have noticed. However, I decided to see if Facebook would let me do something other than just “be”. It worked. Thanks Facebook!

So now I’m “Steve doesn’t use ‘is’ anymore. Thanks facebook!”

Doing a little more poking around revealed that profile.php also had this new “is”less ability. Checking again later in the evening, home.php was back to normal but profile.php was still able to drop the “is”. Unfortunately by this morning, it seems as though both pages were back to their normal mandatory-”is” behavior. I only found one other person I knew with an “is”less status.

Curious, I did some googling to try and determine how widespread this was, and found some news that will be of interest to those sick of “is”. AllFacebook.com reports that on the Facebook Platform news feed, developers were notified that they can now set a users’ status with a verb other than “is” (see here also). When this actually gets rolled out to the Facebook web interface is anyone’s guess, but this probably means that “is”less status messages will be coming sooner than later.

So, in advance of these changes, I bid a fond farewell to Facebook’s favorite verb over the past several years. May “is” rest in peace with Facebook Guy, wherever he may be. While I will miss the crazy status messages that people concocted (or the major grammatical errors committed) as a result of “is”, I might just get over it.

“Steve n’est pas une pipe.”

A Canadian DMCA?

17 November 2007 @ 6:06 am

Michael Geist reports that the new Tory copyright bill mentioned in the throne speech will be tabled in the coming weeks. Given the tone of its mention in the throne speech, as well as the pressure from various content lobbies and the US government (“Blame Canada!”), it’s quite possible that this new legislation will bear at least some resemblance to the (infamous) US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

From all that I’ve read about the execution of the DMCA, I hope that our own government takes a more reasoned and balanced approach in modifying and extending our existing copyright laws. Between the reduction of practical fair use “rights”, the abuse of takedown notices, and litigation for (in my opinion) excessive damages (successfully obtaining judgment for hundreds of thousands of dollars for downloading a album or two worth of songs), the DMCA has some serious problems and upsets the balance between the rights of content producers and content consumers.

As fairly recently affirmed in Canada (and very recently discussed here), the rights provided by the “fair dealing” exception in the Copyright Act are part of maintaining this balance of rights between producers and consumers. As Chief Justice McLachlin noted, “[i]n order to maintain the proper balance between the rights of a copyright owner and users’ interests, [the fair dealing exception] must not be interpreted restrictively.” So let us hope that this concept of balance is in our policymakers’ and MPs’ minds as they work on this bill. And let us be prepared to stand up for our fair dealing rights if such balance is not achieved in the proposed bill. Otherwise, we might end up with our own DMCA-esque law that caters to content providers without upholding the rights of consumers to use content in a fair and reasonable fashion.

“If not us, then who?”

23 October 2007 @ 2:28 am

Lawrence Lessig, founder of the Creative Commons, Stanford law professor, and copyright scholar, has turned his attention to corruption resulting from the influence of money and its impact on the decisions made by government, etc.

He presents a strong and compelling first lecture on the subject here.

Perhaps the most important thing we can take from this is the issue of responsibility. As he states, “The most outrageous part of this story of corruption is that this is corruption primed by the most privileged within our society. And the second most outrageous part is that this is corruption permitted by the passivity of another class of privileged, namely us.”

While those of us who are “wealthy, secure, and articulate” have not committed the wrongs leading to corruption of our government, we are complicit in these wrongs if we sit back and fail to take action.