p2pnet - rss feed: Bill C-60: don’t just sit there!
p2p news / p2pnet:- There were a number of comment posts to my Canada copyright bill update, and I felt a new article would help address these important questions.
A bill goes through three readings in parliament before it can pass.
The first reading in the House of Commons is the introduction where the bill is given a number and published. The parliamentary web site offers a list of bills and more detailed information about the different types
Either before or after the second reading, a bill is referred to a parliamentary committee who then studies and possibly proposes amendments. It’s important to remember that Bill C-60 can still have changes made to it, and our opponents have already proposed some pretty draconian amendments.
Normally, a bill is handled by one of the existing standing committees. For historical reasons, copyright has been handled by Heritage Committee even though the Copyright Act lists the "Minister of Industry" as the minister responsible for the act. Drafting legislation is done jointly by the departments of industry Canada and heritage Canada.
By creating a special legislative committee that will be dedicated to Bill C-60, the government has recognized the importance and complexity of this bill. While this new committee will have some members that are members from the heritage and industry committees, it’ll take into consideration far more than the narrow (and often antiquated) views of those from heritage.
It may seem like an obscure parliamentary detail, but this is a major win for us!
The general consensus of the p2pnet readers was that they wanted to be able to do more to help, but didn’t know how to do it.
There are many things that can be done by each of us.
What you do will relate to your unique skills, the unique communities you’re part of, and how much time you’re willing to invest.
I wrote an article for the Digital Copyright Canada site titled What you can do which provides some options, but there are many more. Each of us is part of multiple networks of people in Canada, and we shouldn’t be shy about using these networks to tell each other about what is going on.
Our opponents claim they have the numbers and the support of the "silent majority", but we know they haven’t even polled their membership to get their views on future directions.
There are also a lot of misconceptions about what the effects of this bill will have, and the tiny number of special interests who will benefit from it. The vast majority of Canadian creators, as well as the public interest, will be greatly harmed by Bill C-60, although the incumbent special economic interest are trying to convince them otherwise.
We need to open up this dialogue with as many people as we can, letting them know this bill has nothing to do with "protecting Canadian Creativity" but everything to do with protecting legacy content industry associations from modernization or competition from the next generation of creative Canadians.
I’m a technical person who doesn’t have a background in political science or law. But I do a large interest in this issue, and I’m learning as I go.
One of the great inspirational writers for me has been Lawrence Lessig who, in his book Code: and other laws of cyberspace suggested that legal code and software code have a lot in common in how they can regulate our lives.
As a software and hardware hacker from an early age. I thought that if I could read, interpret and improve software code, then I could do the same with legal code.
Lessig is also the founder of the Free Culture movement, which has a growing international student movement as part of it. If you haven’t already seen it, please check out his 2002 lecture and the 2004 book, also called "free culture". This is "free as in free speech, free trade, free market, and free society", not as in "free beer". Nobody ever gets confused that a "free trade" agreement or a "free market" is about goods and services that nobody is allowed to charge money for, so nobody should be allowed to remain confused as to what we mean by "free culture".
We must somehow break past our shyness and talk to politicians.
When I speak with various members of parliament, they tell me I’m one of only a handful of individual Canadians that they’ve heard from directly. But I know that there are thuosands Canadians just as concerned as I am about this radical change in law, and we must get past our nervousness of talking to politicians. Our elected representatives are just Canadians like you and I who’ve taken on a specific job. We’re obligated to help them do their job well by providing them with the necessary information that they’re not receiving from the special economic interest groups that’ve been spending a lot of money to misinform them.
I know what it’s like to be shy.
When I was a high-school student, I’d be the one going quietly to the teacher during oral presentations and asking for a zero rather than do public speaking.
But I consider this area of law to be so important that I’ve force myself to get over that shyness and to participate in debates on this topic. The most recent was September 14, 2005 where I debated copyright with a lawyer from Access Copyright at the Council of Federal Libraries (CFL) Annual Fall Seminar.
There was a p2pnet reader who’s been watching the Satellite Radio case, and there’s far more init than meets the eye.
There’s a critical need for Canadians and the Canadian government to recognize that there’s a huge difference between protecting Canadian creativity, and protecting the existing industry associations and distribution mechanisms from competition.
I wrote a letter to a few Members of Parliament titled I want Cabinet to stand up for Canada, not ‘broadcasting’.
Terrestrial radio has a limited spectrum (a small number of possible channels on the dial), and thus consumers have a very limited number of stations to choose from.
Given this limitation, there’s a need to regulate terrestrial radio to ensure that in Canada, those few companies which control this limited spectrum aren’t acting as a barrier for creative Canadians to reach Canadian audiences.
Media concentration and the control of this concentration is considerable, and Canadian Content (CANCON) rules have been one of the few ways the government has regulated the harmful effects of this concentration.
With larger music retail outlets or Internet radio, the spectrum isn’t so limited. Canadian audiences have a wider variety of choice, and what "stations" or recording artists (or labels) will survive in the market is more a matter of consumer choice. In this more competitive environment, Canada has thus far decided that there will be no CANCON regulation.
Since satellite radio is subscription based, and doesn’t have the tiny spectrum limitations of terrestrial radio, it’s far more like Internet radio and retail than terrestrial radio. This means Canada should be regulating satellite radio more like retail, which thus far does not have CANCON regulation.
It’s very common to believe that we’re "torn between going with the wave of technology that can’t be stopped anyway, and with protecting our Canadian content". While I understand where this belief comes from, I must disagree with it. I believe "broadcast" style distribution and the type of media concentration that currently controls it is the greatest threat to Canadian creativity.
What the heritage minister is promoting is not Canadian content, but legacy methods of distributing content using broadcast means. However, I don’t believe she realizes what she’s doing: she’s merely attacking any new medium that doesn’t have the legacy limitations and concentration of broadcasting.
We know the extreme outcome of this type of antiquated thinking. It was the belief that "protecting creativity" and "protecting existing methods of content distribution from competition" that lead to the 1995 Lehman Report, which gave WIPO the 1996 treaties, the United States the extremely controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and now Bill C-60 in Canada. For more details, please listen to the lecture by Cory Doctorow on Policy Laundering, Copyright and the Broadcast Flag.
The existing concentrated distribution mechanisms are the greatest threat to creativity, Canadian or otherwise.
The best way to protect creativity is to protect a full spectrum of methods of production, distribution and funding from the concentrated control from the past. This suggests a forward-looking copyright bill would say exactly the opposite of C-60: It would protect us *from* broadcast media and other forms of concentration, it would protect us *from* Digital Rights Management which is a new form of media concentration in the control of specific IT companies, it would reduce the term of copyright and making the expiry date easy to determine (not obscured who the first holder of copyright was, such as with photographs), and it would abolish Crown Copyright so Canadians can fully exploit the outputs of government that we have already paid for in the same way as our trading partners such as the United States.
Russell McOrmond - p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons).]
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