The standing committee on Canadian Heritage has issued an updated report on recommendations for changes to Canadian copyright law. When I read this Globe and Mail article on it last night, I bookmarked it so I could come back to it when I had time to write a good long rant about it. It turns out I don't need to.
Captain Flynn has a post up that explains some of the problems with the committee's recommendations, as well as providing links to other bloggers who have also addressed the issues, provided links to source material and supplied recommendations for actions to take and petitions to sign. Taken together all of these bloggers do a good job on the potential chilling effect the recommendations of the committee could have on free expression on the internet. But there's another issue here as well.
I did a fairly long post back in May that was based in part on reports about what the committee was looking at. And I suggested at the time that our politicians were giving too much weight to the recommendations of lobby groups whose primary interest is in finding more ways for copyright holders to nickel and dime us all to death. I wasn't surprised to see this in the Globe and Mail article.
Michael Geist, who holds the Canada Research chair in Internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, and Howard Knopf, a Canadian copyright lawyer and director for the Center for Intellectual Property at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago, have sharply condemned the proposals. Mr. Geist blames "an amazing lobby job" by the recording industry, and Mr. Knopf calls it a "travesty [and] an exercise in hyperbole."
Emphasis added. I'm going to sound like a broken record but I don't care. The original purpose of copyright was not just to protect the creators and ensure their ability to profit from their creations. That was a short term goal in service of a long term purpose: to encourage innovation and creativity in ways that would ultimately enrich all of us. But our own government seems determined to follow the lead of others in perverting that idea by making copyright solely about lining the pockets of those who own copyrights, even when the owners weren't the creators and the owners' intentions directly contradict those of the creators.
It's almost laughable that these recommendations are coming from a group whose primary concern is supposed to be Canadian heritage. Apparently their goal is to ensure that heritage is really just a commodity suitable for monopolization. And our freedoms and our right to privacy are for sale.
One of the bizarre events in the hearings on this issue was the fact that Mr. Knopf's submission was not translated into French, and so was ignored by the committee. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe citizens can submit evidence to Parliament in either official language. I assume it is the responsiblity of the committee to translate the document.
The fact that they did not translate it, and that it was subsequently ignored, is highly suspicious.
Signed one of Captain Flynn's petitions and mailed the other.
"that heritage is really just a commodity suitable for monopolization" -- that is well put, pogge, and there are parallels with what is happening to "intellectual" property law generally, the patenting of publicly funded scientific research in the U.S., and so on.
Somehow, creators and researchers have to be convinced that tighter copyright and IP laws are not working mainly to their benefit and are not, as you say, opening up a future of greater innovation and creativity, just the opposite.
The creators and researchers are still going to be wondering how they get paid, of course. I haven't worked that wrinkle out yet, but I can certainly see the problems.