Probably the claim you will read most often in recent weeks from my friendly archvillain Jason J Kee on his twitter feed is that, There is NO COMPARISON b/t #C11 & SOPA. While he is playing with words when he makes this claim, I think it is useful to discuss the narrow way in which he is correct as well as the ways he is trying to distract people from the similarities.
February 6, 2012
April 29, 2011
Wikileaks released 1,800 cables on Canada on April 28. There are many focused on the US pressure on copyright and Michael Geist has published several posts based on those cables.
- Wikileaks Cables Show Massive U.S. Effort to Establish Canadian DMCA (main summary post)
- Wikileaks Cable Confirms Public Pressure Forced Delay of Canadian Copyright Bill in 2008
Wikileaks on CRIA and the U.S. Government: How They Combine to Lobby on Canadian Copyright
- Wikileaks Cable: CMPDA Supports Notice-and-Notice System
- Wikileaks Cable: What Makes for Good Canadian Heritage Minister
- A Wikileaks Cable to Call My Own
Drew Wilson reported on the cables, discussing some of the political impacts of the US influence as well as other Canadians who are speaking up.
June 26, 2010
A Wired article by David Kravets discusses the USA's new Copyright Czar Victoria Espinel, and a “Joint Strategic Plan” concerning intellectual property enforcement. Comments so far have suggested the new Copyright Czar is more balanced with competing copyright holder interests than what we have otherwise heard coming out of the USA in the last decade and a half.
April 6, 2010
Just a quick note that the US Library of Congress requested permission, and I accepted the request, to have this website archived by them. The Creative Commons license for the content of this site already granted them and others clear permission to do this.
URL: www.digital-copyright.ca
Collection: Legal Blawgs
Acceptance to archive Web site
Acceptance to provide offsite access
June 21, 2009
June 8, 2009
The Swedish Pirate Party (Wikipedia) has won one seat (possibly two) in the 2009 European parliamentary elections.
May 6, 2009
I'm going to link two seemingly unrelated things. First, check out the last episode of CBC's Search Engine where Jesse Brown and Michael Geist discuss how the Obama administration has embarrassed itself by elevating Canada to their priority watchlist for Copyright. By any objective fact-based analysis Canada shouldn't be on the list at all, and yet this unsubstantiated lobbiest document from the Obama administration unfairly puts Canada in the company of countries that are a real problem to the economic interests of the US "Intellectual Property" lobby. Not Change we can believe in, but Change for the worse?
Then check out an interview between Jesse and Mike Miner about TVO's Search Engine.
August 26, 2008
An interesting set of threads on SlashDot about the Democratic Convention website using Microsoft's Silverlight platform to distribute multimedia -- excluding anyone not running Windows or MacOS. This is the same party who through policy-laundering their NII policy through WIPO gave the USA their DMCA and was the blueprint for Bill C-61.
It may be interesting for Canadians to speculate what outcome of the 2008 US election will be worse for harming the rights of technology owners. Other thoughts?
See also: ZDNet: Joe Biden's pro-RIAA, pro-FBI tech voting record by Declan McCullagh
June 4, 2008
A Wired BLOG article by Sarah Lai Stirland discusses Obama's presumed win of the Democratic nomination for president.
I've reference Obama in a few past articles that may be worth looking at. It is interesting how many of us got caught up in his campaign, including myself.
May 25, 2008
I wasn't watching the US presidential primaries because I saw it as a race between Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb. I have some political ideas that might otherwise slide me to supporting the Democrats, but then I look at the damage done during the Clinton/Gore years to the US domestic and foreign economic policy through the DMCA, Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, and the two controversial 1996 WIPO treaties (largely US efforts). This isn't all that different than Canada where I have some political ideas that might otherwise convince me to vote Liberal, but then notice that some of the worst ideas on technology law have been promoted by Liberal MPs such as Sheila Copps, Sam Bulte (Lost her seat in the 2006 election), and now Dan McTeague and Hedy Fry.
I then watched a slideshow from Lawrence Lessig titled 20 minutes or so on why I am 4Barack. Lessig said that Obama's technology policies were strong, and that he was going to work to change congress to reduce the influence of special interest group money on the US congress. I quickly blogged about this myself back in February.
Read the rest of this entry on IT World Canada's BLOG »
