Unless this is the first stop of the day on your rounds of the Canadian blogosphere, you probably already know that Jim Elve, the head honcho at BlogsCanada, has been served with a cease and desist order by the Government of Canada. But in case this is your first stop (in which case, thank you very much) here's the gist:
Ever since launching BlogsCanada last August, I've been waiting for the Government of Canada (GoC) to tell me that they don't like the way this site looks so much like the main GoC site.Last Thursday, there was a knock on my door and a friendly fellow from Canada Post had a registered letter for me. The letter was from a lawyer with the Department of Justice (DoJ) acting for the Treasury Board.
The Government of Canada has requested that I cease and desist from what they contend is reproducing the Government of Canada's corporate signature, the Canada wordmark and the Common Look and Feel layout.
In the rest of his post, Jim goes into quite a bit of detail as to why the "corporate signature" and "wordmark" claims look pretty bogus. And in a post on his own blog, James Bow has a good discussion of the more general issues of copyright, plagiarism and parody. What I wanted to discuss is the Look and Feel issue.
A close study of the GoC site will reveal that the government's web designers have actually been pretty creative. Whoever thought of presenting information in multiple columns instead of just having one big column across the whole screen was certainly having a particularly good day. (But don't tell the newspaper industry.) And all those button thingies and hyper link thingies -- that's pretty nifty stuff, eh? And you can click on them and they do things or take you places, too. And using red and green, I mean, that's pretty creative, isn't it? I guess the rest of us may as well just shut down, because everything we could do short of presenting a single column of static information in plain old black has already been done by the government and we can't use any of it.
Seriously, as someone who's in the software development business, even though it's not (yet) web development, I feel qualified to weigh in on the GoC's Look and Feel claim. It's crap. It's also dangerous. There's no more certain way to stifle creativity and innovation then to allow frivolous claims of copyright like this to stand. For one thing, should the GoC win, you can bet that others will be lining up to sue them in turn for every bit of Common Look and Feel that the government web developers didn't invent. And I've spent enough time on the internet to be able to say with certainty that there's nothing truly original on that site.
Unless we want to hasten the day when software development in general is a monopoly, or at least a business that no one can get into without the very deep pockets necessary to pay royalties on everything, or lawyers to defend constant lawsuits, or both, these kinds of frivolous patent and copyright claims need to be shut down. Otherwise every Windows developer can be sued by Microsoft. Then Microsoft can be sued by Apple. And Apple can be sued by Xerox and everyone else is out of business.
Then I suppose you could use your computer as some kind of exotic, information age planter. Of course, you laptop users will be out of luck on that score too.
When we discuss science, creativity and intellectual property it's become common to use the old cliché that today's creators "stand on the shoulders of giants", i.e. they're building on the accomplishments of those who came before. Common though it may be, someone needs to say it to the mental midgets at the Department of Justice. Maybe somebody ought to send them a registered letter. Or did they copyright that, too?
It's nice to see that our government has priorities...
Now if only they could arrange them properly. Or even close to it.
There's the genesis of a general critique of intellectual property laws there in your post. It's actually a huge problem the way that all sorts of building blocks are being shut down through requiring royalties, etc... I hope he fights it.
Ian,
We've had pretty good experience with lawbloggers offering pro bono help down here. This is a nuisance suit that won't hold up in court. All he needs to do is get a lawyer to fire off a stiffly-worded letter.
I doubt it will ever get to court. Jim was smart to draw attention to it, even if he did it partly as promotion for BlogsCanada. When they went after paulmartintime.ca, I'm sure the surprising amount of press it got was a factor in the way Team Martin backed off.