A link to the above video came directly from Charlie with the following text:

Angus challenges Conservative thinking over digital innovation issues in the wake of comments by Conservative Senate Leader Marjorie LaBreton who said she doesn't understand technologies like facebook and she thinks they are dangerous.

He then challenges Jim Prentice over the U.S. arm-twisting to enact a DMCA-style copyright Act. The Conservatives have pledged that all treaties will be debated in the House of Commons before being ratified. Angus challenges Prentice on refusing to bring WIPO into the House prior to any new copyright legislation.

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Details on his BLOG.

Thomas Denton wanted to raise money for cancer. He did so by enlisting the services of several professional and amateur comic book artists, who drew original artworks featuring famous DC comic book heros, then selling them on Ebay with the proceeds to go to the charity.

But just how wrong was he to do this without the permission of the super hero copyright holders? I argue on DeathByCopyright.ca that he was not at all wrong.

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A note from Cory Doctorow about how to donate in support of Little Brother:

Last week,I told you about my donations program for my new book, Little Brother. Every time I put a book online for free, I'm inundated by offers of cash "tips" from people who got the ebooks for free. I don't want anyone's money (cutting my publisher out of the loop isn't good for them or me), so I came up with an alternative. I asked librarians and teachers who wanted free copies to step forward and put their names down, and now I'm looking for would-be "donors" to step forward and send them copies of the book.

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May 30'th, 2008 is the 6 year anniversary of GOSLING: Getting Open Source Logic INto Governments. We are having a party at the Parliament Pub, just in front of the parliament buildings in Ottawa. For details and any changes please see our website where we also ask people to RSVP so we can plan food.

GOSLING started in May 2002 as a couple of informal Friday gatherings after work at the pub, to bounce around some ideas ahead of the first free/libre/open source software event hosted by the Government of Canada. We have been meeting nearly every Friday since. Our weekly gatherings are very informal. While we expect our 6-year anniversary party to be larger than any other GOSLING gathering in the past, it will be equally informal.

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Michael Geist reported that Canadian copyright scholar Howard Knopf squares off against Stevan Mitchell of the Entertainment Software Association on Buisiness News Network's show SqueezePlay. You can read my letter to the show on IT World Canada's BLOG.

As a listener to the Security Now podcast, I sent in the following feedback.

Steve,

I am a long time listener, but two of my complaints came together in your discussion of the RSA show in episode 141.

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Michael Geist's blog today points to a study by Taylor Wessing which compares various national IP laws around the world. No doubt, Canada's laws are judged by the report to be very strong which supports Geist's conclusion that "claims that Canada's international reputation has been harmed by our intellectual property laws are the stuff of fiction."

This is a great study to demonstrate that our laws are strong enough. What is missing, and what I'd love to see next, is a study that compares the fairness various laws.

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The Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics has released a report which includes:

The parliamentary Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics:

• deplores the fact that, at the request of Treasury Board, as of April 1, 2008 officials are no longer updating the Coordination of Access to Information Requests System (CAIRS), a central database for all requests filed with the government under the Access to Information Act;

• demands that the Conservative government reinstate this tool, which promotes transparency and accountability; and

• encourages the Conservative government to make this database available online and free of charge.

  I agree, and was in fact surprised that a party who campaigned on accountability and transparency of government would abandon rather than expand this important system.

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A few hours after posting my article on the content industry vs content delivery providers I was sent a link to an article titled "Raging Grannies demonstrate for fair contracts for freelancers" by its author, journalist Shannon Lee Mannion. The contracts that the big media companies are asking freelance journalists to sign are getting worse and worse all the time. I feel really bad about this situation, and I do anything I can in my policy work to help improve the situation for authors -- especially freelance creators given I am one myself with my self-employed business.

I am left with mixed feelings, however, because I believe that the organizations that should be helping authors -- organizations like the Professional Writers Association of Canada (PWAC), The Writers Union, and other members of the Creators Copyright Coalition and DAMIC -- have been promoting policies which will have the effect of protecting or worsening the market conditions that enabled these bad contracts in the first place.

Read full article on IT World Canada's BLOG »

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It's good to see that the copyright issue is still on the radar of the mainstream media. Such coverage will be very important if the coming legislation is going to be as bad as many expect.

Chris Brand was quoted in today's Vancouver Sun on the issue. Way to go Chris!

One of the common problems you will see in policy discussions is that many people are focused on their narrow issues, sometimes even tiny edge-cases, and not investing any time looking at the bigger picture of how different policies interact. This leads to the solutions to these edge cases sometimes causing even worse problems for the proponents.

We had one of those moments at CopyCamp when I tried to demonstrate a bigger picture issue by adding in "Net Neutrality" related discussions into a narrow discussion of business models for authors.

Read full article on IT World Canada »

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The following is a summary from Cory of a recent feature:

My latest column in Locus Magazine, "Think Like a Dandelion," came out of a talk I had with Neil Gaiman about the bio-economics of giving stuff away for free. Mammals worry about what happens to each and every one of their offspring, but dandelions only care that every crack in every sidewalk has dandelions growing out of it. The former is a good strategy for situations in which reproduction is expensive, but the latter works best when reproduction is practically free -- as on the Internet.

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I came across an interesting article today discussing how the BBC has forced a knitter to take instructions down from her website because of alleged copyright violations. Not for selling knitted objects which resemble BBC characters, not even for the pictures of the creations she made, but for instructions which tell other knitters how to make their own creations in the form of these BBC characters.

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An ITWeb article by Leon Engelbrecht starts:

[Johannesburg, 6 May 2008 ] - The Shuttleworth Foundation and the Canadian International Development Research Centre will, for the next two years, fund research in eight African countries on the relationship between copyright and education.

Reading a press release from Timmins-James Bay MP Charlie Angus, you will see the following:

"Angus is one of the only MPs who has relied on income from copyright royalties from music, book and textbook sales to make a living. He says the New Democratic Party strongly supports fair remuneration for artists but that copyright must be looking forward to the 21st century reality rather than attempting to force consumers back to an obsolete 20th century business model."

It is interesting to note that while federal Members of Parliament come from many walks of life, most of those who are vocal on technology law have very little experience with the relevant technology, or businesses affected by them. Musician and author Charlie Angus stands out as an exception.

Read full article on IT World Canada's BLOG »

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WATCH OUT FOR THE DMCA PARADE: Angus Warns Lobbyists Setting Groundwork for New Copyright Legislation

With new copyright legislation said to be just weeks away, MP Charlie Angus, the NDP Spokesman on Digital Issues, is advising Canadians to watch out for a carefully orchestrated pageant by the trade lobbyists. Angus predicts that certain politicians and lobbyists will try to drum up fear over Canada’s reluctance to sign on for heavily restrictive, U.S.-style Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) legislation.

Read full release on Mr. Angus' website >>

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Overall, CopyCamp last week was great and brought people with a wide variety of views of the future of creativity and the roll of the Internet together. There was one very odd phenomena that I would like to describe, and that is what happened whenever anyone mentioned the "G" word: Michael Geist.

Dr. Michael Geist is a law professor at the University of Ottawa where he holds the Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law. He has authored many academic papers, articles for newspapers, as well as running an active BLOG on related topics.

Whenever his name was brought up the conversation quickly split into two groups: people who see him as a great ally, and those who seem to think he has horns coming out of his head. Because of this strong split it was hard to have a reasonable conversation once his name came up, a form of Godwin's Law for CopyCamp.

Read full article on IT World Canada's BLOG »

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An article by Jay Somerset of Canadian Business Online discusses the move by music labels away from encoding their recorded music with a DRM wrapper. While the title is "The Death of DRM", we all need to remember that a DRM system involves two locks -- a lock on content and a lock on devices -- with the lock on our devices being the source of most of the problems with a DRM system. While an increasing part of the content industry is recognizing that DRM systems don't benefit them, there is still a push to impose laws which protect the locks on devices "in the name of" the content industry. At CopyCamp earlier this week I hear no decrease in the desire of members of traditional Canadian creator groups to ratify the controversial 1996 WIPO treaties and "legal protection for TPMs".

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Tuesday evening and Wednesday all day was the second CopyCamp. The first CopyCamp was held in September 2006, and I actively participated in both. The first good news is that all the language coming out of the organizing committee is that they already have a desire for there to be a third, so this may become a yearly event.

Read full article on IT World Camada's BLOG.