James Moore’s “radical extremists” speech: the annotated version

I’m just trying to figure out why MP James Moore is destroying all the political capital he’s generated over the years to support digital locks. Then again, he’s starting to clam up when asked for comment by the media.

Can Canada keep up in the exabyte race?

This is why your phone bills are so expensive: the carriers need to build new infrastructure.

Signs that demand threatens to overwhelm supply have already appeared. Bell has twice flirted with a capacity crunch. At the Vancouver Olympic Winter Games, Sidney Crosby’s gold medal-clinching goal in overtime saw a torrent of texts, streaming video and other data requests flood the network in a single, historic burst of wireless activity.

Those signals got through, but Stephen Howe, Bell’s chief technology officer, said the burst came close to exceeding what the carrier provisioned for. “With Sidney’s goal, we nearly hit capacity,” he said.

“Bill C-32 offers rights that the consumer will not be able to exercise”

NDP MP Charlie Angus challenges James Moore and Tony Clement, the Conservative MPs behind the flawed Bill C-32, to remove the digital locks provision. (Via Michael Geist.)

“Fuck it, I’m Aquaman”

An interview with Book Madam Julie Wilson.

Cory Doctorow responds to James Moore

Cory Doctorow lists his objections to Bill C-32 and James Moore’s claims that radical extremists are driving the opposition to digital locks. The most important point: copyright holders will be just as stripped of rights as consumers.

Here’s what that means for creators: if Apple, or Microsoft, or Google, or TiVo, or any other tech company happens to sell my works with a digital lock, only they can give you permission to take the digital lock off. The person who created the work and the company that published it have no say in the matter.

So if you buy $1,000 worth of digitally locked books for your Kindle or iPad, the author and the publisher can’t give you the right to move those to another device. That means that not only are you locked into the Kindle — so is the copyright holder. Authors and publishers who decide to stop selling via a digitally locked platform have to take the risk that their readers will abandon their investment in proprietary books in order to follow them to the next device.

Pretty simple fix to the bill — change the rules on digital locks to allow consumers control of the material they have lawfully purchased.

See also Michael Geist’s response to MP Moore, as well as the NDP’s Charlie Angus’s response.

Here’s a clip of Moore’s speech about copyright reform from Michael Geist’s YouTube channel (full speech is here):

Cory Doctorow on Books on the Radio

In this podcast Sean Cranbury and Cory Doctorow discuss gold farming, the 87 novels Cory is set to publish this year and how you don’t really need publishers to get your work out there anymore, although they are kind of handy for doing certain things. Like all the annoying publishing stuff.

Canada should adopt an openness principle

Michael Geist on Canada’s digital economy strategy.

First, open government policies, including the use of the Internet to increase transparency and the adoption of open licences to government content to make it more readily usable and accessible. Canadian municipalities such as Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto, and Ottawa have provided leadership in this area in recent months and the federal government could use the digital strategy process to follow their example by committing to an open access approach to government data.

Apple to offer unlocked iPhones in Canada

The Globe reports if you buy a new iPhone from Apple, you’ll be able to sign up with whatever provider you want — and switch whenever you want. Maybe this will make the cell providers do something about all the dropped calls with iPhones in Canada.

Elections Canada considers online registration

Umm, about time? (Via Michael Geist.)

Today’s Bill C-32 roundup

People were posting fast and furious about Bill C-32, the proposed new copyright legislation, while I was in Toronto last week. I’m still trying to catch up on it all, but here are the bullet posts:

• Michael Geist’s 32 Questions and Answers on C-32′s Digital Lock Provisions, Part Two: circumvention exceptions
• Michael Geist’s 32 Questions and Answers on C-32′s Digital Lock Provisions, Part Three: exemptions from the bill found in other countries but not Canada
• Michael Geist’s 32 Questions and Answers on C-32′s Digital Lock Provisions, Part Four: the consumer provisions, such as they are
• Michael Geist’s 32 Questions and Answers on C-32′s Digital Lock Provisions, Part Five: business considerations
• John Degen on why Kobo is the e-reader service that might just be the solution to everybody’s problem: business and consumers. And if it works for books, it can work for movies and music too. I’ve been saying for years that server-side DRM and cloud-based access is the way to make everyone happy, and Kobo, my e-reader of choice, appears to be pulling it off.

“With digital locks come digital responsibilities”

Over at the Calgary Herald, Rory McGreal, the associate VP of research at Athabasca University, argues that allowing digital locks to override users’ other rights is a bad idea.

Well, at least we should still be able to back up our work for protection, right? Sorry, this will not be possible if the vendor decides to add a digital lock. If you think you can freely read classical books and view the old movies that are in the public domain, think again. Vendors can lock them up and render them accessible only to paying customers. What if you want to play a DVD on your machine, but don’t use MS Windows? Too bad if the vendor decides to limit your use to Windows because using decryption software to play your legal copy on your computer will be illegal.

32 questions and answers about Bill C-32

Michael Geist is addressing some of the concerns people have about the government’s new copyright bill. I’ve posted before about how the digital lock provision is deeply flawed, and Geist shares this view:

The digital lock provisions in C-32 appear to distinguish between copy controls and access controls.  Isn’t that enough to address concerns about the bill’s impact on fair dealing?

No.  The distinction in one section of Bill C-32, which was also contained in C-61, does not address the fair dealing concerns in the bill.  First, the distinction between access controls (access to the work itself) and copy controls (copying the work) is a distinction without a difference for many of today’s TPMs.  The digital locks used by Amazon or Apple on e-books or the TPMs on DVDs are both access and copy controls.  In order to effectively circumvent to be able to copy, you have to circumvent access.  The locks often permit access for some uses, but not others.  In other words, Canadians will often need to circumvent access to get to the copying and therefore will still be infringing under the law.

Moreover, even if a consumer could distinguish between access and copy controls, the tools themselves that would be used to circumvent for copy purposes cannot be lawfully marketed or distributed.  The notion that it is permissible to circumvent for copying but that the software needed to do so can’t be distributed demonstrates how this distinction really makes no real difference.

Finally, many of the other new exceptions – format shifting, time shifting, and backup copies – are covered by all digital locks, including both access and copy controls.

Related: John Degen points out the series of short films from the Canada Film Centre urging people to respect copyright, and links to some experts who take issue with Geist’s reading of the bill. The arguments over exactly what the bill means in respect to consumers’ rights indicates it still needs some revision/clarity.

See also: Geist’s Bill C-32: Flawed but fixable.

New iPhone coming to Canada soon

Shiny!

We like everything but the digital locks part

Concern is growing over the digital-locks provision of Bill C-32 — you know, the part that says you have the right to use the material you buy in any way you wish unless there’s any sort of DRM on it, in which case you have no rights at all.

Previously:

• New copyright bill: Unfair to consumers?

New copyright bill: Unfair to consumers?

The Tories have introduced the new copyright bill, and it’s what everyone expected: some token protections for consumers that are trumped by a digital locks provision that’s far too inflexible.

The good:

• It’s now OK to copy material to other devices for backup
• It’s now OK to create mashups using copyrighted material
• It’s now OK to record material for later viewing, as long as you’re not making a permanent library

The bad:

• It’s illegal to break digital locks, even for any of the reasons stated above

So it’s legalizing what everyone’s doing already, but then allowing corporations to add restrictions to their devices that impede common usage. As Michael Geist points out, the new law doesn’t have to be this inflexible when it comes to the digital lock provision:

Canada could comply with the WIPO Internet treaties (which serve as the impetus for these provisions), provide legal protection for digital locks, and still preserve the copyright balance.  Doing so would simply require a provision confirming that circumvention of a digital lock is not prohibited when undertaken for lawful purposes.  Similar language can be found in other countries’ digital lock legislation and – as the top issue raised during last summer’s copyright consultation – should have made it into this bill.

The Conservatives have apparently indicated they’re open to amendments. So get out there and make some noise about the digital locks issue.

Related:

• CBC: Copyright bill would outlaw breaking digital locks

New copyright rules: Format shifting OK, digital locks OK

The Globe says the Conservatives’ new copyright legislation will allow format shifting — people copying files they’ve already purchased so they can use them on other devices — but will also endorse the use of digital locks.

The Harper government is moving ahead with a controversial law that would spell out in much sharper detail what Canadians can and cannot do with digital copies of songs, movies and TV episodes.

Under the proposed regime, however, any digital locks that companies slap on this material – and others such as electronic books – will in most cases trump consumer rights to copy them.

New copyright legislation this week?

Judging from this Star article, it looks like digital locks are going to be the battleground issue.

OTTAWA—This week Ottawa will try once again to update Canada’s copyright law that Industry Minister Tony Clement says has holes big enough to “drive a Mack truck through.”

The Copyright Act of Canada has not had a significant rewrite since 1988, at a time when the Internet was still in its infancy and an iPad was just a twinkle in some inventor’s eye.

The trick — one the Conservatives and Liberals before them couldn’t master — is to find a balance between right of consumers’ and the rights of the artists or creators to not have their work ripped off.

NOW Magazine launches iPad edition

An app is also apparently on the way for those who can’t resist the lure of the shiny new iPad. So so shiny….

iRage at Rogers

People are pissed at Rogers over the company’s plan to have a separate data plan for iPads, meaning users would not be able to add the device to an existing plan, such as their iPhone package. On the one hand, there are no surprises here. The business model of the cellphone companies has always been to tie plans to specific devices. Actually, to lock plans to devices. But it’s a brave new world — or should I say a brave new cloud? Companies are increasingly providing services rather than products — just look at the new online Microsoft Office, which is intended to compete with Google’s online life services. Rather than trying to gouge consumers for as much as they can on each device, Rogers should be looking at creating the best online service they can to keep people with them for the long run. As in: “Here’s your data plan. Use it with whatever devices you want. Let us know how else we can keep you happy enough to continue paying us a monthly fee.” If they don’t keep people happy, maybe someone else will.

Canadian DMCA on the way?

Well, this probably isn’t good.

Months of public debate over the future of Canadian copyright law were quietly decided earlier this week, when sources say the Prime Minister’s Office reached a verdict over the direction of the next copyright bill.  The PMO was forced to make the call after Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement were unable to reach consensus on the broad framework of a new bill.  As I reported last week, Moore has argued for a virtual repeat of Bill C-61, with strong digital locks provisions similar to those found in the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and a rejection of a flexible fair dealing approach. Consistent with earlier comments on the need for a forward-looking, flexible approach, Clement argued for changes from C-61.