mike the mountain

Below is the email I received yesterday from the Industry Minister’s office (Ministers Clement and Moore – Minister.industry@ic.gc.ca):

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:31 PM, Ministers Clement and Moore wrote:

Thank you for your correspondence regarding copyright policy.

We are pleased to inform you that the Government of Canada has introduced
legislation to modernize the Copyright Act, bringing it up to date with
the advances of the digital age.

This legislation will bring Canada in line with international standards
and promote homegrown innovation and creativity. It is a fair, balanced,
and common-sense approach, respecting both the rights of creators and the
interests of consumers in a modern marketplace. The federal government is
working to secure Canada’s place in the digital economy and to promote a
more prosperous and competitive country.

The popularity of Web 2.0, social media, and new technologies such as MP3
players and digital books have changed the way Canadians create and make
use of copyrighted material. This bill recognizes the many new ways in
which teachers, students, artists, software companies, consumers,
families, copyright owners and many others use technology. It gives
creators and copyright owners the tools to protect their work and grow
their business models. It provides clearer rules that will enable all
Canadians to fully participate in the digital economy, now and in the
future.

For more information, please visit www.balancedcopyright.gc.ca.

Sincerely,

Tony Clement
Minister of Industry

James Moore
Minister of Canadian Heritage
and Official Languages

Here’s my response. I tried to keep it as calm and professional as possible, on the (slight) chance that someone ever actually reads it.

Ministers,

While I appreciate that there has been some consideration for the public consumer’s rights since C-61, unfortunately this proposal still has digital locks overriding all other rights, which make all your supposed “exceptions” moot. As long as that provision remains in place, Canadians still do not have the basic rights and freedoms to use digital media in legal and beneficial ways; ways that you have stated should be core to a “modern” copyright legislation.

Please fix this problem. It makes everything else in the bill meaningless. Simply add the exception that digital locks can be circumvented if done so for legal reasons (research, news reporting, criticism, parody, satire, education, personal format shifting, time shifting, etc.). That one exception would truly be putting the rights of Canadians above the marketing strategies of commercial entities. It is a simple fix, but a significant statement.

The priorities of your administration in regards to this issue have become a major embarrassment, from the results of the Copyright Consultation project right up to recent quotes from the Prime Minister. As more of the general public become aware of the implications of this bill, the controversy and apparent disregard of Canadian’s interests in exchange for satisfying US lobby pressure is going to continue to be a problem for you and your party. I hope sincerely that you will do what is right for Canadians.

/Michael Lawton

Damn you James Moore:

“Reports in the Canadian media confirm what was reported in the blogosphere several weeks ago – out-of-touch Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore has won the internal fight for a Canadian DMCA. The reports say the Canadian government is likely to introduce the bill next week complete with digital lock provisions that mirror those found in the U.S. DMCA. The bill may also include some important new exceptions, but those will be subject to the use of a digital lock. In other words, they are new rights that come with a big caveat in that they can be eliminated anytime by a rights holder.”

From the National Post:

“…the copyright law will likely have the greater impact on average Canadians as they increasingly rely on downloaded entertainment.

All signals suggest Heritage Minister James Moore has triumphed over the objections of Industry Minister Tony Clement, setting up Canada to march in excessively protected lockstep with a United States that boasts the toughest laws against pirated music or movies on the planet.

It may well be a legal constraint that’s impossible to enforce, but the rumble out of the PMO suggests the new law will ignore the extensive public consultations that advocated a go-easy take on copying of CDs and DVDs in favour of robust anti-consumer limits on transferring or sharing content.”

Emphasis mine.

Guess that whole Copyright Consultation project was a complete waste of time.

It’s crap like this that make it really hard for me to decide whether I want to go into politics. The optimist in me says that I should get involved so I can FIGHT this sort of bullshit corrupt sellout of our rights; the pessimist in me says if this is the kind of garbage that goes on in our political system I don’t want anything to do with it.

Created and sent via the Canadian Coalition for Electronic Rights:

May 20 2010

The Honourable Tony Clement
Minister Of Industry, Science & Technology
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6

The Honourable James Moore
Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6

Dear Ministers,

In the summer of 2009 the Government of Canada held public consultations on copyright and Canadians engaged in those consultations at unprecedented levels.  Unfortunately, it now appears that the Government may be poised to ignore the vast majority of Canadian consultation submissions and proceed with anti-consumer copyright reform legislation.  Legislation that would employ strong protection for digital locks, a rejection of flexible fair dealing and support for specific technologies and business models.  Legislation that may indeed be more stifling than the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which, over the course of the last decade, has proven to be a backwards, ill-conceived approach to copyright.

To ignore the input of thousands of Canadian consumers and creators when modernizing Canada’s copyright regime would be irresponsible.  Alternatively, I urge this Government to heed what Canadians have told them and only proceed with legislation to reform copyright that is technologically neutral by not integrating protection for specific technologies or business models (e.g. all-encompassing prohibition of circumvention devices and technologies).  Legislation that expands and protects fair dealing to ensure Canada has the legal framework to adapt to future business models and new forms of creativity we have yet to discover.

Fortunately, there remains time and opportunity for this Government to reassess its approach on copyright reform and ensure that the input provided by Canadians via public consultations process is taken into full consideration.

Sincerely,

Michael Lawton

CC: The Honourable Michael Ignatieff
CC: Marc Garneau – Official Opposition Critic For Industry, Science & Technology
CC: Pablo Rodriguez – Official Critic For Canadian Heritage and Official Languages
CC: Charlie Angus – NDP Digital Affairs Critic
CC:  Rajotte.J@parl.gc.ca

What an awesome year.  Even though by some measures it wasn’t quite the year I had hoped for, there’s never a bad time in the world of Mike.

One unfortunate thing that I allowed to affect almost everything in ‘08 was my shoulder injury.  In February I had what seemed like a very minor fall while snowboarding that ended up dislocating my shoulder and tearing my rotator cuff.  I have NEVER had any kind of injury take so long to fully heal!  I’m still not at 100%.  The toll this took on my usual fun and games was catastrophic: couldn’t go snowboarding for the rest of the winter, couldn’t golf at all during the summer, had to drop out of a marathon training program (still managed to run a 1/2 marathon), couldn’t wear a backpack with any weight so no overnight hiking, couldn’t do any of the normal physical activities that I usually enjoy (weightlifting, rollerblading, squash, swimming, etc.) and, as important, that keep me in any kind of healthy condition.  End result is me being in the absolute worst shape of my life: fat, weak, and pretty dang pathetic.

Enough!  That’s the other thing I let that injury do for me all year: gave me an excuse to be a whiny lazy bitch, eat badly, not do the exercise I could do, etc.  Starting TODAY, I’m back to eating well and working my a$$ off.

One goal I thoroughly enjoyed surpassing was writing at least one blog post a week.  I managed to put up 62 posts in 2008, some of which actually involved original thought!

The big highlight vacation was a roadtrip through BC.  Chrystal had never seen BC outside of Vancouver and our West Coast Trail hiking trip, so I resolved to show her as much of the rest of this incredible slice of paradise as I could.  We did a whirlwind tour of the southern interior, wine country, up the Sunshine Coast, across the island, a week (SUR-fing) in Tofino, then up through the central-BC backroads to Jasper. Tenting the whole way, enjoying some incredible local produce, grilling fresh fish over a campfire, drinking amazing wine every night… awesome.  A trip every Canadian needs to do at least once in their life.

I got all fired up about the proposed copyright legislation some twisted, ignorant, bought-and-paid-for, miserable excuse for a public servant tried to force down our throats and wallets.  Not that I have an opinion about it or anything…

In May I moved this humble little blog from Blogger to my own Wordpress site.  Also started Twittering, because I really don’t have enough ways to waste time online.

Dreamgirl (who I think should start her own blog) had a huge year as well: running her first marathon in Edmonton at the end of the summer, on one of the hottest days of the year!  Also, to the joy of us both, she took a part time job at Mountain Equipment Co-Op.  Just for the extra money, of course.  Nothing to do with the staff discount, amazing trips, cool people, or any of that stuff.  Really.

A big personal achievement in the work world was finally building and launching our new website and blog.  I’m pretty dang proud of this, and I hope you will swing by every once in a while and let me know how I’m doing!

This is a concise info page developed by Kempton Lam and Michael Geist to highlight some of the most obvious and identifiable faults with Bill C-61, Minister Prentice’s Canadian DMCA.  Great for helping explain why this bill is so wrong for Canadian citizens.  You can download the pdf here.

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!

A rare appearance, and a chance for us to actually speak to him about Bill C-61, the controversial, corrupt, DMCA-style sellout of Canadian’s rights.

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!

My MP is James Rajotte.  He is from the same party as Minister Prentice, but I’m sincerely hoping that he is more inclined to keep the party’s promise to openly discuss and debate matters like Bill C-61.  Mr. Rajotte “…currently serves as the Chair of the Parliamentary Committee on Industry Science and Technology.  Since being elected Chair, the Committee has conducted studies and produced reports on the Counterfeiting and Piracy of Intellectual Property;”.  I hope this means that he is not ignorant of the potential impact of the new copyright bill on his constituents (like myself), and I really hope that he is of a higher ethical standard than Minister Prentice seems to represent.

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

I know it seems like I’m bitching a lot about this copyright stuff… but GAH!  You have no idea just how bad this is and how much it will affect you.  Directly.  We can’t wait until everyone’s getting sued and we’ve lost so many of the things we used to enjoy.

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.

Arrived in my inbox about an hour ago:

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.

It’s happening.

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.

The more I read about this stuff, the worse it gets…

As if the national (ie: Canadian) laws weren’t getting screwed up enough, now there’s a proposed international treaty that’s even more rife with abuse and blatantly biased bull$#!t.

From the Sydney Morning Herald – Digital copyright: it’s all wrong:

The ACTA draft is a scary document. If a treaty based on its provisions were adopted, it would enable any border guard, in any treaty country, to check any electronic device for any content that they suspect infringes copyright laws. They need no proof, only suspicion.

They would be able to seize any device – laptop, iPod, DVD recorder, mobile phone, etc – and confiscate it or destroy anything on it, merely on suspicion. On the spot, no lawyers, no right of appeal, no nothing.

The draft contains other draconian measures. It proposes a governing body for copyright protection that would operate outside organisations such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the UN. In short, it proposes a global police force, answerable to no one, with intrusive powers that vastly exceed those currently available to adherents of the concept of intellectual property.

The proposed treaty is being sponsored by a small group of US Congress members, all of whom Wikileaks says have received significant contributions from major record companies and film studios. As they say, “follow the money”.

Read the rest here.

I have a hard enough time just keeping my mouth shut with the security theater nonsense we have to put up with at the airport as it is (”Thank God they made Grandma take her shoes off, now we’re all safe from terrorists!”).  Now I have to worry about some underpaid uneducated bully with a plastic badge rooting around in my laptop looking for pictures of my girlfriend he can download for “personal use” later!?  Of course I can protest all I want… in a windowless room with a latex-covered finger up my @$$ while my plane takes off without me… or I can just comply like a good little citizen.

I have a pretty decent size music collection, just over 12.000 tracks on my iPod right now.  I used to DJ in University, but more importantly I download a LOT of independent music put out by undiscovered bands because I love looking for a new sound and I love the passion that goes into the tracks that these guys put out, hoping and praying for their one shot.  I do things like grabbing the fully legal and authorized torrent put out each year by the SXSW music festival containing around 600-900 songs, one song from each band playing in the festival.  How exactly am I supposed to alleviate the “suspicions” of some airport security goon who decides to screw with me by confiscating my iPod??

If this thing goes through, I’m going to end up in jail somewhere, I know it.  There’s just no way I’m going to be able to keep my mouth shut.