Paul V's blog

Like many people, I’m concerned that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations are being used to launder copyright reform through a secretive international trade agreement and do an end-run around the recent public consultations in Canada. However, it’s really tough to comment meaningfully on the subject without transparency into the process. In an effort to enlighten myself, I filed a couple of Access to Information (ATIP) requests with the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT).

One of my requests was deliberately wide-open, requesting any communication between the Trade Department and third-parties about ACTA. I’m trying to figure out who’s been consulted, who’s seen draft treaties, and so on. My second request was more specific, requesting the most recent draft text of the treaty as well as a copy contemporaneous with that shared by the United States government with a number of companies and organizations. While draft treaties are exempt under the Access to Information Act, I figured that since the treaty has already been disclosed to some parties, there’d be no statutory reason to withhold that version from me as well.

In response to both requests, DFAIT requested a 6 month extension. To put that in context, the statute allows for 30 days to respond to requests, allowing extensions for specific reasons. My requests were extended under section 9(1)(a), which allows an extension in cases where “the request is for a large number of records or necessitates a search through a large number of records and meeting the original time limit would unreasonably interfere with the operations of the government institution.” I can concede this for my first request, which as I mentioned is quite open-ended. However my second request is quite specific, and I had a hard time believing it could take 6 months to comb through the records. I emailed my contact for an explanation, and was told that:

because of the volume of requests that we have now, and our limited resources, we are taking extensions of 180 days for our requests

This is clearly not acceptable under the Act. Now, it’s not the fault of my contact or even the DFAIT ATIP office, which is under-funded and under-staffed. The contact that I spoke with there was extremely helpful and apologetic. Two years of Information Comissioner reports mention that the DFAIT ATIP office has requested additional funding to keep up with the workload, which vastly increased when the government adopted a policy that other departments needed to consult with DFAIT on any ATIP request which could prejudice Canadian foreign policy/international trade. The Information Commissioner’s latest report on DFAIT does a good job of summarizing the problem. I’m sympathetic with the overloaded workers on the ground there, but management absolutely needs to step up and fix the problem.

Given that the current government was elected on a platform of improved transparency, it is incumbent on them to properly fund one of the busiest transparency-focused departments. Unless, and forgive this baseless speculation, a delay in transparency makes it easier to conduct secret negotiations without the annoying necessity of having to involve those annoying—what are they called?—Canadian citizens.

See also:

• Canwest’s exposé: Foreign Affairs violating disclosure laws: experts
• ACTA timeline

IP access to information, acta, copyright

The fee-for-carriage (or value-for-signal) debate misses the point. Television delivery is already moving online. Bell now has a pure IPTV delivery system for television in condos. Sites like Hulu provide on-demand access to programming. Granted, IPTV has been hyped now to the point that people are getting sick of it, but the simple fact is that television is moving inevitably to internet distribution. Canada was almost a decade ahead of the United States on internet delivery, until Parliament modified the Copyright Act to neuter the emerging business model.

Specifically, Parliament modified the Copyright Act to prevent retransmission of television online, despite allowing the cable companies to continue to aggregate over-the-air signals without having to worry about copyright. Section 31 writes that it “is not an infringement of copyright for a retransmitter to communicate to the public by telecommunication any literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work [...]” but defines a “‘retransmitter’ [as] a person who performs a function comparable to that of a cable retransmission system, but does not include a new media retransmitter.”

With that one change to the Act, Parliament shut down innovative sites like iCraveTV, who were already rebroadcasting television online in 1999. For comparison, Hulu didn’t launch until 2007. In fact, the government was originally going to extend the Copyright Act to include online distribution, but the Heritage Committe caved to special interest pressure from the United States, the broadcasters, and the cable industry. Sound familiar?

I’m sad that our government surrendered to old media special interests. Much like we lost our early advantage in telecom and internet penetration, we threw away a potential lead in new media business models. Hopefully we don’t continue the trend with the current work on the Copyright Act or surrender to US pressure again in the form of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

IP copyright, distribution, television

DVD FBI warning (source: antypography.com)

Richard Ackerman (@scilib) tweets: “I wonder how many Canadian person-hours are wasted each year by us being forced to watch FBI piracy warnings on DVDs & some iTunes content“?

I decided to take a stab at estimating an answer. Note that this is a total back-of-the-envelope calculation that is likely on the right order of magnitude but otherwise wildly inaccurate.

There are a number of things we need to know:

Doing the math, we can estimate that Canadians spend about 4.6 million hours watching the copyright and FBI warnings on DVDs. If we want to put a dollar figure on it in the laziest way possible, just multiply by the median salary and we get $82 million dollars in wasted time.

See also my critique of the Toronto International Film Festival’s copyright warning.

IP copyright, copyright for canadians, estimate, piracy

In “The (legal) music fades out for Canadians“, Barrie McKenna repeats a number of American recording industry talking-points, and ignores the depth and breadth of the copyright reform debate in Canada.

McKenna makes a number of misleading claims. To address some of them: Canada’s copyright isn’t out of step with the Western world, but is fully compliant with Berne; Isohunt is involved in a lawsuit with the CRIA, but it was Isohunt that first sued CRIA for a declaratory judgment; the music industry contributes far less to Canadian GDP than does the technology industry; and, there is tremendous growth in Canadian digital distribution.

Much has changed since copyright was first created, but blindly passing legislation to improve the short-term revenues of American companies isn’t in the long-term best interest of either Canadian culture or the Canadian economy. McKenna writes that there “are good reasons for Canada to embrace reform” and in this he is correct. However, any reform should listen to Canadian citizens, be designed for the long-term benefit of our culture, and ultimately keep in mind the utilitarian goal of maximizing the public good.

Thanks go to Techdirt for bringing attention to the original article.

Edit: An interesting (and not constrained to 200 words) response to the G&M article by Tom Koltai on Perceptric Forum.

IP copyright, copyright for canadians, letter

Lily Allen performing (left), Jammie Thomas post $1.9m verdict (right)

Lily Allen and EMI appear to infringe 38 music copyrights for commercial gain and make millions. Jammie Thomas infringes 24 music copyrights for private enjoyment and is found liable for $1.9 million in damages.

A little back-story is in order. A week ago, Mike Masnick over at Techdirt posted an article discussing 50 Cent’s take on piracy. Lily Allen copied this post verbatim and included it in her blog, where she simultaneously criticized people for copying music. Masnick called her out on the hypocrisy, and boom, an internet fiasco is born (Lily’s blog has since been taken down).

While this is interesting on the face of it, there’s more. It came out during all the discussion that Lily creates and distributes mixtapes, mixtapes which she has admitted are infringing on the copyrights of the musicians she “stole” from. How she lives with the cognitive dissonance is beyond my understanding.

Unfortunately, this isn’t all academic ivory-tower talk. Real people, in the real world, are getting screwed doing the exact same thing. Jammie Thomas, a mother of 4, was one of the few folks brave enough to go to trial over file-sharing. The court has hit her with a judgment of $1.9 million dollars, or $80,000 per track. It’s pretty clear there’s no way she’ll ever be able to pay that, and that the amount of the damages is grossly out of line with both any damage she could have caused, and any reasonable punishment what at this point is normal behavior.

One hopes that Lily will recognize that she’s in a position of privilege, and offer to help Jammie Thomas pay her ridiculous judgment. A quick look at the track listing for Lily’s two mixtapes reveals at 38 cases of possible infringement. At Jammie’s rate, that would be $3 million. However, not only was Lily’s infringement willful, but she rode it to profits! So likely she’d be in for more damages. Let’s add 25% to make up for it, bringing the per track damages to $100k per, for a total of $3.8 million.

I’m sure Jammie would take a personal cheque, just this once.

See also:

• The complete list of Techdirt’s Lily Allen posts
• Ars Technica’s coverage of the Thomas verdict
• Track listing for Lily Allen’s first and second mixtapes
• Both mixtapes are still hosted on Lily’s site at mixtape 1 and mixtape 2

Edit: Added image, mixtapes are down, check out Dan Bull’s open musical letter to Lily.

IP copyright, copyright for canadians