CBC Radio’s Search Engine just posted/aired its interview with Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice about his Canadian version of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. They’ve been trying to get him on the air for months now and he finally consented to ten minutes, but he delivered nothing but spin and outright lies about his legislation and ended up hanging up on Jesse Brown, the interviewer.

You have to listen to this — in it, the Minister lies, dodges, weaves and ducks around plain, simple questions like, “If the guy at my corner shop unlocks my phone, is he breaking the law?” and “If my grandfather breaks the DRM on his jazz CDs to put them on his iPod, does that break the law?” and the biggie, “All the ‘freedoms’ your law guarantees us can be overriden by DRM, right?” (Prentice’s answer to this last one, “The market will take care of it,” is absolutely priceless.)

Ten minutes’ worth Prentice’s only interview with the national radio network’s most tech-savvy program about his new, sweeping tech bill leaves us with the inescapable picture of a Minister who either doesn’t know what’s in his own legislation (he repeatedly says, “Well, that’s a very technical question,” as an excuse for why he can’t answer it) or doesn’t care if he presents it honestly, so long as it passes.

I can’t wait for Charlie Angus to play this back in Parliament during the next Question Period: Ministers who lie on national radio about their legislation don’t fare well in Parliamentary democracies.

MP3 Link

(Thanks to everyone who sent this link!)

(Disclosure: I am a paid columnist for Search Engine)

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Civlib (165)

Copyfight (129)

How pissed are Canadians about the new copyright bill, Bill C61, which was introduced without any consultation and which makes it a crime to upload clips to YouTube or use a region-free DVD player? Way pissed.

Ten thousand more Canadians signed up for the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group in the day following the Bill’s introduction, bringing the grand total up to 50,000. Michael Geist has more ways you can show the government what you think of these shenanigans.

1. 1. Write to your MP, the Industry Minister, the Canadian Heritage Minister, and the Prime Minister.  If you send an email, be sure to print it out and drop a copy in the mail (no stamp is needed – c/o House of Commons, Ottawa, ON, K1A0A6).  If you are looking for a sample letter, visit Copyright for Canadians.
2. 2. Take 30 minutes from your summer, to meet directly with your MP.  From late June through much of the summer, your MP will be back in your local community attending local events and making themselves available to meet with constituents.  Give them a call and ask for a meeting.  Every MP in the country should return to Ottawa in the fall having heard from their constituents on this issue.
3. 3. If you are not a member of the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group, join.  If you are, consider joining or starting a local chapter and be sure to educate your friends and colleagues about the issue and starting working through the list of 30 things you can do.

Link

Tagged

Civlib (160)

Copyfight (125)

Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice introduced his answer to the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act today as planned, and it’s even worse than the US DMCA. The Canadian DMCA allows every single exception to copyright to be eliminated by adding DRM: whatever the law allows you to do, a corporation can take away, just by using DRM to prevent you from doing it. Breaking DRM is illegal, unless you fit into a tiny, narrow, useless exception for security research.

It used to be that Parliament got to write copyright law. Now, it’s Hollywood companies, who get to overrule Parliamentary law with whatever “business rules” they put in their DRM.

Michael Geist has the depressing analysis. Makes me want to cry. Watch this space for tips on getting in touch with your MP to make sure that this farce dies in Parliament.

1. As expected, Prentice has provided a series of attention-grabbing provisions to consumers including time shifting, private copying of music (transfering a song to your iPod), and format shifting (changing format from analog to digital). These are good provisions that did not exist in the delayed December bill. However, check the fine print since the rules are subject to a host of strict limitations and, more importantly, undermined by the digital lock provisions. The effect of the digital lock provisions is to render these rights virtually meaningless in the digital environment because anything that is locked down (ie. copy-controlled CD, no-copy mandate on a digital television broadcast) cannot be copied. As for every day activities like transferring a DVD to your iPod – those are infringing too. Indeed, the law makes it an infringement to circumvent the locks for these purposes.

2. The digital lock provisions are worse than the DMCA. Yes – worse. The law creates a blanket prohibition on circumvention with very limited exceptions and creates a ban against distributing the tools that can be used to circumvent. While Prentice could have adopted a more balanced approach (as New Zealand and Canada’s Bill C-60 did), the effect of these provisions will be to make Canadians infringers for a host of activities that are common today including watching out-of-region-coded DVDs, copying and pasting materials from a DRM’d book, or even unlocking a cellphone. The liability for picking the digital lock is up to $20,000 per infringement.

While that is the similar to the U.S. law, the exceptions are worse. The Canadian law includes a few limited exceptions for privacy, encryption research, interoperable computer programs, people with sight disabilities, and security, yet Canadians can’t actually use these exceptions since the tools needed to pick the digital lock in order to protect their privacy are banned. In other words, check the fine print again – you can protect your privacy but the tools to do so are now illegal. Dig deeper and it gets worse. Under the U.S. law, there is mandatory review process every three years to identify new exceptions. Under the Canadian law, its up to the government to introduce new exceptions if it thinks it is needed. Overall, these anti-circumvention provisions go far beyond what is needed to comply with the WIPO Internet treaties and represents an astonishing abdication of the principles of copyright balance that have guided Canadian policy for many years.

Link

• Peter
  said: If you live in Canada you need to call your member of Parliment.

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Happy Mutants (92)

Photo (48)

Science (70)

Robbo sez, “Stunning photos of the Earth and the Moon taken from Mars by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera.

Akin to the seminal Earth rise photos from Apollo 8 in 1968 – these images made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

That’s us out there.”

Link

(Thanks, Robbo!

• Jason
  said: I have nothing to add but 'wow.'
• Carlos M
  said: Para lembrar como somos minúsculos…
• mernisse
  said: Wow. What a view.

Tagged

Science (1890)

Charlie Stross is hosting an open conversation on other things we could have bought with the money wasted in Iraq: for example, we could have sent a colony of over 500 astronauts to Mars, provided modern nuclear power to the USA and shut down its coal plants, build modern cities for 600,000,000 Chinese people to live in, and so on:

For $6Tn we could buy a lot of juice — a quarter of our global civilization’s energy budget would go carbon-neutral at a stroke. (Yes, we just solved our carbon dioxide emissions problem by switching to a nuclear economy.) This probably isn’t the ideal way of dealing with our environmental problems, and it’s a naive treatment of the costs (has anyone done a proper treatment of the economic implications of shifting the planet over to a nuclear economy, say to the same extent as France?) but it’s thought-provoking.

Finally, there’s all the other little stuff we could solve by pointing $513Bn at it, never mind $6000Bn. Eliminating childhood diseases in South-East Asia? Piffle — Bill and Melinda Gates are trying to do that out of their pocket lint. Build first-world grade housing in shiny new cities for 600 million Chinese peasants, nearly a tenth of the planetary population? Yes, this budget will cover that. What else?

Yes, I’m asking you: what would you do with the cost of the Iraq war (take your pick: $513Bn or $6000Bn) in your budget? Colonise Mars? Solve our carbon emission problem and fix global warming? House half a billion people? Or something else …?

(And what isn’t going to happen now, because we pissed it all away on the desert sands?)

Link

Flickr’s Joe D! has a laugh-out-loud set of 75 “refaced” US bank-notes, in which the various dead presidents are reinvented as a series of ever-funnier defacements.

Link

(Thanks to everyone who suggested these!)