To: Mr. Rick Casson
House of Commons
Parliament Buildings
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6

CC: The Honourable Jim Prentice P.C, M.P.
5th floor, West Tower
C.D. Howe Building
235 Queen St.
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0H5

CC: The Honourable Josée Verner, P.C., M.P.
Minister of Canadian Heritage
25 Eddy Street
Gatineau, Quebec K1A 0M5

Subject: Please Stand Against the New Copyright Bill

Dear Sir,

I am 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 practises, such as unlocking cell phones and copying the contents of purchased CDs and DVDs for use in iPods (or other digital music players). The current bill outlaws these practises. 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 Peer-to-Peer 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. WE DESERVE BETTER, and you can make a difference.

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,

Jeff Milner

Check out Online Rights Canada’s new action alert, “Tell MPs What’s Wrong with the Prentice Bill” and use the site to send a message to your own Member of Parliament.

Here’s what their website says about it:

“After months of hesitation, Industry Minister Jim Prentice has finally revealed his re-write of Canada’s rules of copyright. Tell your MP just what you think of it.”

2984 people have used the copyrightforcanadians.ca website to take action. Add your voice today!

I’ve played around in the open source 3D modelling software Blender a little bit. It may not be as fancy as the retail software on the market today, but if you compare it with versions of Maya or MAX from just a few years ago, it blows them out of the water.

A team of creative folks used the free software to make a short animated cartoon, Big Buck Bunny. They were funded by Blender foundation support and pre-orders of the DVD by the Blender community.

It’s licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, so it’s free to watch and distribute so long as the credits are attached. Theoretically you could even download the source files, remix the movie and then sell it for a profit. Here is the original movie via YouTube:

Watch Big Buck Bunny now on YouTube or one of the many other official viewing options.

The Canadian government is about to bring down Canada’s version of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and it promises to be the worst copyright law in the developed world. It will contain an “anti-circumvention” clause that prohibits breaking the locks off your music and movies in order to move them to new devices or watch them after the company that made them goes out of business — and it will follow the US’s disastrous lead with the DMCA in that there will be no exceptions to the ban on circumvention, not even for parody, fair dealing, time shifting, or other legal uses.

• Canada’s coming DMCA will be the worst copyright yet
• HOWTO Fight Canada’s coming DMCA copyright law
• Canadian DMCA Won’t Include Consumer Rights

Basically, in the US, it is illegal to even ‘pick the locks’ of anything that is keeping you from accessing the content, EVEN IF YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO DO SO.

In plain English? You can’t rip songs off YOUR CDs to play on YOUR iPod. The company who runs the DRM system goes out of business? Too bad. Want to unlock your cell phone to run on another network? Nope. You want to copy an eBook that is in the public domain? No way. You want to use a clip from a documentary DVD in your own commentary? Fat chance. You want to backup anything copyrighted that you bought? Think again.
The list goes on and on…

This summer, while working at a camera/photography store in Lethbridge, one of the jobs I did was Photoshop work and printing photos.

One day a middle-aged woman came into the store carrying an old 8×10 of her deceased parents. She explained that the photo had been damaged when it fell off the wall and the glass protecting it, broke and cut into the image. She asked if we would be able to photoshop the damage out and make a new copy.

Before I could speak, the manager of the store pulled the image from my hand and inspected the photograph.

“Who took the photo?”

There was no stamp on the back and she didn’t know. She explained, “It was taken about 30 years ago by a photographer that their pastor hired to take family photos at their church”.

He told her due to copyright laws, he would not print her a new image. (Nevermind the illegally copied Photoshop program he was using to charge $45/hour to make other’s copies).

Should it be illegal to recover the woman’s photo? Common sense revolts at the idea.

But she never did get it fixed.

See this great TED talk by Larry Lessig speaking about the shortcomings of our dusty, pre-digital intellectual property laws.

The other day I discovered a site hosting a modified version of my backmasking page. The version this site was hosting looked almost exactly like the version I had created except the links back to my website had been removed.

This morning I sent an email to the contact address listed asking them politely to remove it from their site. I haven’t heard back from them yet.

Shortly after I read the site’s own copyright notice:

Do not take [website name removed].com’s link out of any code found on [website name removed].com, if you do so you are breaking the law.

An interestingly strong position to take, considering that’s exactly what they did to me.

I also found it interesting that the site was using services from gocopyright.com. A site that claims for $59 they will register your online works with the United States Copyright Office.

(I am not a lawyer, so don’t take anything I say here as legal advice.)

If you’re worried about preserving your rights, you might be interested to know that copyright laws in Canada and the United States as they are now do not require the rights holder to register his or her works in order to hold the copyright. All you have to do is create a work, and presto—you own the copyright and you still have your $59!

As far as I can tell, the $59 is a waste of money for a service that claims, “Your copyright must be registered in order to take legal action against an act of infringement.” Though I am not a lawyer, I’d say this is not true. If you own the copyright, it stands to reason that you can take legal action regardless of registration.*

Independent of these issues, I’d caution anyone about using their service after reading their disclaimer that,

“You expressly agree to use this site at your own risk. The website content, forms, and material on our website are provided “as is”, without warranties of any kind either express or implied with regard to their legal effectiveness, adequacy, suitability or completeness.”

It sounds like they know it’s a superfluous service and don’t want to be caught without a legal leg to stand on, so they wrote one in.

As far as people out there copying my backmasking site goes, I prefer that they just paste a link to the site instead. Here’s an example of the code you could use:

<a href="http://jeffmilner.com/backmasking/>Jeff Milner's Backmasking Site</a>

*I suppose it should be noted that registration could be used as evidence that you are the original creator of the work, but I would guess it’s not the only way you could provide evidence.

Update: The website proprietor said he would take down the copied files, but had quite the gem of an explanation as to why he felt entitled to remove the links back to my site:

“Sorry about that, I will remove your content from my site as soon as possible. Note that it is not in my best interest to direct links to other sites unless you pay for advertising which I’m sure you won’t like to do.

Regards.”

Wow.

Viewers of the popular David E. Kelley show Boston Legal will be familiar with the outrageous behavior of William Shatner’s character Denny Crane. What they may not be familiar with, is the real life version of Denny, Mr. Robert Tourtelot, a “jack of all trades” lawyer from Southern California.

Recently Tourtelot contacted Travis Corcoran, owner of the How-To DVD rental service, “Smart-Flix”, and accused him of breaking the law. When Corcoran questioned lawyer Tourtelot on which law, exactly, he had broken, Tourlelot responded, that it wasn’t his job to educate Corcoran and that he should get his own attorney for that.

Shortly thereafter, the story gets VERY interesting, with Tourtelot doing everything from short-jokes and name calling, to challenging Corcoran to a fight and even threatening to call in the FBI.

[Tourtelot:] Dear Mr. Corcoran: I am in receipt of your e-mail to my client, Mr. XXX. I note your comments about me. I have a proposition for you. I will pay your way to California if you will agree to come and meet me in a gym, the address of which the limo driver who meets your flight will have.

Oh yes, the deal only includes a one-way ticket, as I do not believe you will be needing the return portion! Ciao, and have a good day. RHT

[Corcoran:] Are you proposing a boxing or MMA match?

I accept. I’ll pay my own way back, of course.

Any weekend in June works for me.

Please mail the airline ticket (departing from Logan Airport, in Boston) to the address I previously supplied.

I look forward to our bout (I usually do heavy bag work in my training sessions, but I’ll make sure to add some speed bag work to the mix over the next few weeks).

Shall we specify the same $1,000 wager that you suggested to Mr. XXX in your bet about my height?

[Tourtelot:] Plain and simple, pal. A street fight.! By the way, do you have a Black
Belt also?

[Corcoran:] Please send the plane ticket.

If the Boston Legal writers happen upon this story, they should totally write it into their script because I can totally imagine Denny Crane doing all of this.

For comedy relief, check out The Robert Tourtelot saga.

(via)

Jason Scott wrote an astute post about the pros and cons of a creative commons liscense for people to consider.

Check it out.

One case that sticks out in my mind was this guy who had his stuff up on Opsound, totally claiming the license of CC-BY-SA, but also including “you may not make any changes to the work” in the description of his band. His music was pretty good, and I was considering using it, but that dissonant line got my attention. So I wrote him, and said “So are you licensing it Creative Commons, or is it copyrighted? Because you can’t have both those lines in there.” His response, somewhat crankily, was “No, it’s definitely CC licensed, but you can’t change it.” My ill-advised response was “Well, yes, yes I absolutely can.” Things went downhill from there.

It basically boils down to the importance of, not only reading but understanding, the small print.

The fact that I love this sort of stuff so much makes me wonder if I wouldn’t have been better off becoming an intellectual property lawyer.

Vanity Fair has written a great article about file sharing and specifically about the folks at The Pirate Bay! It’s six pages that I really enjoyed, and if you’re interested in the file sharing issue you should read it too.

Pirates of the Multiplex: On The Web: vanity fair.com

Michael Wesch, assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University has created a short video (runtime 4:31) that elucidates how the technical side of of the Internet is maturing enough to give people greater freedom to create than ever before.

Click play or watch Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us at YouTube.

(In the YouTube description he states that it’s still in draft form).

A couple of weeks ago I watched a YouTube clip entitled Spiders On Drugs. It’s a parody of the old Hinterland Who’s Who show that you may remember if you watched Saturday morning cartoons in the 1980’s here in Canada. Hinterland’s Who’s Who would come on between shows—I used to hate them, “enough with the stupid animals I want to see cartoons!”

This interesting read is the story of Andrew Struthers who made the video and his narration of what happened after he posted it on YouTube.

When Niall Kennedy found out a creative commons licensed photograph he had taken was being misused by Microsoft, he did what any net savvy blogger would do: he replaced the image with goatse. (Ok, personally I wouldn’t have gone that far, but it definitely got their attention).

From his site:

I license my text and image creations under Creative Commons licenses in the hope they will help other people tell a better story or unleash some sort of increased creativity upon the world of content I enjoy every day. When that content is used beyond the terms of my published license I choose to take various forms of action ranging from e-mailing or sending an instant message to the person (if I have it or can query accurate information without much effort) or by issuing legal documents of copyright violations to the offensing site or host.

Read the whole story: Handling of Microsoft’s copyleft violation.

Aaron Swartz narrates his afternoon at the The United State Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit as Larry Lessig attempts to reform copyright law. I found this to be a very interesting look into US laws, the rights of copyright holders, and the challenge of changing the world.

Elephant’s Dream is a computer animated movie, released on DVD format and online under a Creative Commons license. That means even if you’re living in the States where peer-to-peer file sharing makes you feel all icky with downloader’s remorse, you can aquire a copy of Elephants Dream and still feel like a good netizen the next day.

‘Elephants Dream’ is the result of almost a year of work, a project initiated and coordinated by the Blender Foundation. Six people from the Blender user/development community were selected to come over to Amsterdam to work together on an animated short movie, utilizing Open Source tools only.

I haven’t watched the completed film yet, but the Elephants Dream teaser is intriguing.

One of the things I think I would enjoy most if I were an employee at Google would be listening to all the great speakers the company pays to come in and give lectures. Here is an tremendously interesting talk about the pros and cons of software patents and the related trappings: Are Software Patents Evil?

Because there’s so much scope for design in software, a successful application tends to be way more than the sum of its patents. What protects little companies from being copied by bigger competitors is not just their patents, but the thousand little things the big company will get wrong if they try.

A folk/rock singer named Jonathan Coulton has created a really cool music video using Creative Commons licensed Flickr Photos. It’ll put a smile on your face.

Jonathan Coulton’s Flickr.mov

Update: here is the big 17mb version Flickr.mov