Have you heard of Outlander?  Do you like the sound of a “Sci-Fi Viking Epic”?  Do you like aliens and dragons and spaceships and barbarian warriors and massive battles and Jim Cavieziel and John Hurt and Ron Perlman and Lord of the Rings meets Predator meets Beowulf??  Do you want to see a movie like that?

Good luck.

Once again, a movie that looks amazing, is getting great advance press, but doesn’t fit neatly into the “second-class sequels, unwanted remakes, or blatant Oscar-baits” corporate strategy is getting dumped unceremoniously and with as little marketing as possible onto a handful of screens then relegated to the bottom row of a Blockbuster wall, to be passed over by people who probably would have loved it on the big screen but “never even heard of it, so it must suck”.

Moriarty, from movie geek uber-site Ain’t It Cool News, posted an open letter to Harvey Weinstein, of The Weinstein Company (who owns the rights to this film) begging him to reconsider and give this movie the attention he believes it deserves.  The Weinsteins have brought some amazing and risky genre movies to us in the past (Grindhouse, Kill Bill, Sin City, The Mist); unfortunately they also have a habit of buying up the rights to some really cool foreign/independent productions and then sitting on them until everybody forgets about it (Shaolin Soccer) or chucking them out to guaranteed obscurity with limited screens or direct to DVD and no marketing (Equilibrium, Feast).  Sadly, it looks like the latter choice is the way they’re going for Outlander.

Maybe I have no idea what I’m talking about… maybe Outlander sucks horribly and they’re just trying to minimize their losses.  Unless I’m one of the lucky 50 or so cities that get to see Outlander in theaters I guess I’ll have to try and track it down on DVD to figure it out.  Somehow though, I get a feeling from the trailer below that this is my kind of flick.

Hands Off My DVDs - C-61 prohibits transferring DVDs to a computer or video player, locks out region coded DVDs
Hands Off My iPod - C-61 prohibits transferring copy-controlled CD to iPod
Hands Off My PVR - C-61 prohibits recording broadcast flagged TV shows

Hands Off My Teachers - C-61 forces teachers to destroy their digital lessons after 30 days
Hands Off My Librarians - C-61 forces librarians to use DRM (digital locks) for digital delivery of articles
Hands Off My Film - C-61 is opposed by documentary filmmakers who fear it will make it more difficult to create films
Hands Off My Artwork - C-61 locks out artists from using some works and makes it more difficult to create

Hands Off My Kids - C-61 makes lawsuit against teenagers more likely
Hands Off My Privacy - C-61 makes it more difficult to protect your privacy against DRM’d products
Hands Off My Copyright Rights - C-61 renders fair dealing obsolete in the digital world
Hands Off My Research - C-61 could make our researchers infringers for circumventing for research purposes
Hands Off My Students - C-61 locks out students from accessing their digitally locked electronic books

For more info and find out how to help,  please visit  www.FairCopyrightForCanada.ca and join the Fair Copyright For Canada Facebook groups (both the national and Calgary chapter)

Don’t forget about the Stampede Breakfast Rally tomorrow!

Minister Prentice has avoided public appearances like the plague because he either:

• a) realizes that he is committing a disgusting betrayal of his fellow citizens and knows that there is no way he could defend his actions, or
• b) is too ignorant to understand what he is doing and doesn’t want to have to again demonstrate his complete lack of knowledge about the consequences of this bill to the Canadian people.

I’m personally leaning more towards b), especially after hearing him parrot back mind-bogglingly stupid talking points whenever he actually is challenged about the real-world implications of C-61 (check out this CBC interview, where he flat-out lies, then hangs up on the interviewer).  When the only responses he can come up with are “The market will take care of it.” or “They probably won’t prosecute.”, you know he just doesn’t give a crap about the Canadian public.

From Kempton:

Date: Saturday, July 5, 2008
Time: 8:45am - 11:00am
Sign up: Facebook event (optional)
Location: Osteria de Medici parking lot
Street: corner of Kensington Road and 10th Street NW, Calgary
Map: see this Google Map

Please bring along a cash donation for the Children’s Cottage Society and make your voice heard.

*** Meeting place at 8:45 ***

Meeting at the Osteria de Medici parking lot at the corner of Kensington Road and 10th Street NW at 8:45am. We will have a short briefing. And take some group photos and group videos sharing our concerns re Bill C-61.

*** 9:00 - 11:00 Breakfasts & meet Minister Prentice ***

Get our Stampede breakfasts and have our chance to talk to Minister Prentice about our C-61 concerns. We may each only get a few seconds of Prentice’s time. So be concise. Speak on areas that we are passionate about and knowledgeably. Remember to speak politely, clearly and firmly.

*** Slogans and information sheets ***

A concise and brief information sheet on the various C-61 issues and concerns can be downloaded here.

Note: To save paper, there are three copies of the same information per sheet of paper. Please print a few pages and cut these sheets into three parts.

Please download & print the slogan you are most passionate about and knowledgeable about so you can speak with conviction. The PDF slogan files can be found under their respective directories here. There is a Read-me file if you need extra help.

*** Photos and Videos ***

Please shoot plenty of photos and videos throughout our peaceful protest to post on Facebook, YouTube, and our blogs, etc.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and a video may be a million. A picture, an audio clip, or a short video can sometimes change people’s minds and may be change the world for the better.

Lets get our message out.

I honestly would not be surprised to find out that Minister Prentice no-shows tomorrow, but I still encourage EVERYONE that can get to Calgary to please show up and say something!  Keep up the public pressure and they will back down!

and I love XKCD and intelligent humour…

(unfortunately I really HATE that this office blocks me from uploading pictures to my own site!!)

Apparently there’s some political dick wagging happening over at Lionsgate that might scuttle the flick.  My good friend Brian over at Horror-Movie-A-Day is trying to organize a campaign to save Midnight Meat Train:

A very reliable SOURCE from Lionsgate has told me that the Lionsgate decision to “dump” Midnight Meat Train in as few screens as they are contractually required and then rush the film to DVD is based purely on INTERNAL POLITICS.

The new head honcho doesn’t like the old head honcho and is deliberately “dumping” all of his films out of spite and malice.

But there is HOPE! The only thing that overrides backstabbing politics in Hollywood is PURE GREED. It is clearly not healthy for investor relations to “dump” a movie that has a vocal and dedicated audience. Midnight Meat Train represents the kind of horror film that audiences have been dying for!!!

There is growing internal pressure within the company for a wider release of this film and PUBLIC FAN PRESSURE may help to push this decision over the edge.

Read the rest here, and get on board!

Another provision of Bill C-61 allows you to record television shows on your PVR. That is, if the broadcaster doesn’t disallow recording, which it can do by embedded a “broadcast flag” within the signal — a digital signal that tells your PVR that it’s not allowed to record the show, because that will cut into sales of the DVD box set of the show that they’ll eventually release. In other words, in many cases, your PVR will actually be less capable of recording shows than its clunkier, lower-fidelity predecessor, the VCR.

Here’s another way the VCR has an edge over the modern PVR: with a VCR, you can keep a permanent library of your favourite shows, which will last as long as your tapes do. No such luck with a PVR under Bill C-61: PVRs built in compliance with the bill are not allowed to keep a permanent library of your shows. They will be built with a limited amount of storage and with no backup capability, and just to be safe, all shows recorded on a PVR will be deleted if they are kept for longer than a pre-specified amount of time.

Read the rest of his post here.

Then write to your MP.

Here’s what the letter from Copyright For Canadians looks like. It’s going in the mailbox right now.

June 13, 2008

Mr. James Rajotte
House of Commons
Parliament Buildings
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6

Subject: Please Stand Against the New Copyright Bill

Dear Mr. Rajotte,

I’m a constituent who has been following recent developments in Canadian copyright law. I’m concerned that the Copyright bill presented by the government on June 12th goes too far in outlawing the lawful use of copyrighted material, and does not take into account the needs of consumers and Canada’s creative community who are exploiting the potential of digital technology. I’m disappointed that this bill adopts an American approach to digital copyright laws, instead of crafting a Canadian approach.

Canada’s copyright laws need to advance Canada’s interests. This means copyright laws that respect ordinary consumer practices, such as unlocking cell phones and copying the contents of purchased DVDs for use in video iPods. The current bill outlaws these practices. This means copyright that facilitates the work of Canadian creators, such as documentary filmmakers, who instead find that this bill outlaws the use DVDs as source materials for their films. This means we find made-in-Canada solutions to the challenges of file-sharing, such as consideration of the P2P proposal of the Songwriters Association of Canada. Instead, this bill paves the road to importing the consumer file-sharing lawsuit strategy that has failed so spectacularly in the United States. Canada deserves better.

Please ensure that this bill really is made for Canadians by allowing all Canadian stakeholders a say in its final contents. That means meaningful consultation in the coming months, and opening up Canada’s copyright policy to more than just the special interests that lobbied behind the scenes for this law. As my MP, I urge you to represent my interests in the copyright debate.

Sincerely,

Michael Lawton

Here’s your 5-minute civic duty:

Copyright For Canadians has a very simple tool that makes it easy to email your MP about Bill C-61.  After you send the email, print it out, put it in an envelope and send a physical copy (tends to get a lot more notice).  It doesn’t even cost you postage.  Here’s the address:

Last December Minister Prentice tried to sneak this garbage through, and we managed to stop him.  Fortunately, he made the classic mistake of the corrupt puppet politician: he severely underestimated the intelligence and will of an educated public.  Now he’s hoping to force this through while everyone’s “checked out” for the summer.  A massive public outcry is our only chance of stopping this and saving the rights and money of millions of Canadians.

By Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing:

Canadians: write to your MPs about Canada’s disastrous new copyright bill

If you’re a Canadian and you care about the future of culture, art, free speech and the Internet, you need to do something about the Canadian version of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that Industry Minister Jim Prentice introduced yesterday. This bill was prepared without any consultation with Canadian stakeholders: there was no input from industry, libraries, education, artists’ groups, Canadian record labels, technology developers or citizens’ groups. Instead, the bill was written to specs handed down by the US trade rep and ambassador (who kept on telling the press about the “assurances” they’d had from the Minister on the bill’s features).

The bill makes it flatly illegal to break any kind of digital lock, or to violate terms in one of those absurd end-user license agreements that make you promise to agree to let the record industry kick your teeth in and drink all your beer, just for the dubious privilege of paying for a song at iTunes or watching a video on Viacom’s website. This amounts to private law: under Prentice’s plan, Parliament would get out of the business of making copyright law, simply enforcing whatever copyright law the entertainment industry itself dreamed up.

This is even worse than the approach the US DMCA took ten years ago, and look where that’s got them. Tens of thousands of Americans have been sued, key innovative technology companies have been destroyed, computer scientists have been jailed, and what did it get them? Certainly not an end to infringement — file-sharing is up in every country in the world. And for all the money the record industry has harvested from tech startups and music fans, not one dime has been paid to an artist.

The Government of Canada has introduced Bill C-61, An Act to Amend the Copyright Act. The proposed legislation is a made-in-Canada approach that balances the needs of Canadian consumers and copyright owners, promoting culture, innovation and competition in the digital age.

What does Bill C-61 mean to Canadians?

Specifically, it includes measures that would:

• expressly allow you to record TV shows for later viewing; copy legally purchased music onto other devices, such as MP3 players or cell phones; make back-up copies of legally purchased books, newspapers, videocassettes and photographs onto devices you own; and limit the “statutory damages” a court could award for all private use copyright infringements;

• implement new rights and protections for copyright holders, tailored to the Internet, to encourage participation in the online economy, as well as stronger legal remedies to address Internet piracy;

• clarify the roles and responsibilities of Internet Service Providers related to the copyright content flowing over their network facilities; and

• provide photographers with the same rights as other creators.

What Bill C-61 does not do:

• it would not empower border agents to seize your iPod or laptop at border crossings, contrary to recent public speculation

What this Bill is not:

• it is not a mirror image of U.S. copyright laws. Our Bill is made-in-Canada with different exceptions for educators, consumers and others and brings us into line with more than 60 countries including Japan, France, Germany and Australia

Bill C-61 was introduced in the Commons on June 12, 2008 by Industry Minister Jim Prentice and Heritage Minister Josée Verner.

For more information, please visit the Copyright Reform Process website at www.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/crp-prda.nsf/en/home

Thank you for sharing your views on this important matter.
The Honourable Jim Prentice, P.C., Q.C., M.P.
Minister of Industry

The Honourable Josée Verner, P.C., M.P.
Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women
and Official Languages and Minister for
La Francophonie

While it is nice to (finally) see some communication to the public about this bill, I’m afraid I have to call bull$#!t on the talking points. Allow me to address a few of the more egregious:

…expressly allow you to record TV shows for later viewing; copy legally purchased music onto other devices, such as MP3 players or cell phones; make back-up copies of legally purchased books, newspapers, videocassettes and photographs onto devices you own; and limit the “statutory damages” a court could award for all private use copyright infringements;

To minimize the impact of my own ignorance, I offer this response from one far more qualified than I:

[None] of these provisions come close to meeting the concerns of the many groups that have spoken out on copyright over the past six months. Moreover, the Prentice Canadian DMCA is still likely to render Canadians infringers where they seek to use these new exceptions in the digital realm. For example, last week there were reports that NBC inserted copy-controls into some of their television programming that rendered Windows Vista Media Center users unable to record television shows. Under the Prentice plan, users that seek to circumvent the digital lock to record the television show (as he will claim they can) will still violate the law. The same is true for copy-controlled CDs - try circumventing the copy-controls to shift the music onto your iPod and you’re violating the law even with a device-shifting provision.

That’s Dr. Michael Geist, Law Professor at the University of Ottawa and Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law, and one of the most outspoken critics of Bill C-61 and other industry-biased legislation. What I read into this is that even though Minister Prentice is paying lip service to the concerns of us “everyday” Canadians (whom I assume he is depending on being too lazy and/or stupid to realize what he’s doing), we are still having our rights sold off to foreign commercial interests. In essence, this bill simply promises to enforce whatever rules the major US studios feel like inflicting upon us.

it would not empower border agents to seize your iPod or laptop at border crossings, contrary to recent public speculation

Of course not… that’s the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, the other US-led, rights-trampling, behind-closed-doors, bought-and-paid-for legislation that Prentice is shilling. Only ACTA operates on a global scale. Frankly, it frightens me even more than C-61.

The rest of that email is an exercise in vague double-speak and attempted spin. I’ve seen a few comments online from people saying this bill is dead in the water already, and only being thrown out on the table as a PR move for Minister Prentice to show his supporters/puppeteers that he’s trying to do their bidding, if only he didn’t keep running into that annoying inconvenience of “the people” (why can’t they just shut up and let him do whatever he wants so he can make lots of money for his friends at Warner Brothers??).

God I hope so.

Right now.

Industry Minister Jim Prentice and his if-there’s-any-justice-in-the-world-future-co-defendant Josée Verner are tabling their new copyright legislation this morning in Ottawa.

There is nothing in this farce that remotely fosters innovation, promotes Canadian arts, or defends the rights of Canadian citizens.  It is a 100% sellout to a narrow group US media industry titans.  Big business doesn’t want it, artists don’t want it, universities and libraries don’t want it, international treaties don’t need it; Prentice’s own party promised public consultation which has been refused every step of the way.

I guarantee you, if this goes through, within days you will see the first of many, many abusive, overreaching lawsuits against average Canadians by foreign corporations.  And Jim’s the one that opened the door, rolled out the carpet, and invited them in to rape and pillage.

I promise here and now, if this goes through, not only will I NEVER again vote for a member of this party, but I will actively campaign against them at every opportunity.

If anyone reading this has the slightest level of influence over anyone in the political arena, please contact them ASAP and beg them to stop this.  I’ll take a step back here, whether you agree with me or not, I can’t imagine anyone that thinks it is a good idea for laws that affect this many people so directly should be developed in secret, under direct foreign influence, without any input or discussion from the public it claims to serve.  All I’m asking for is this bill to be openly debated and the inputs from those it will most directly affect be permitted and considered.  If I don’t agree with the end result, so be it.  As long as the majority of us in this democratic nation feel that they are best served, I’ll keep my mouth shut.