The Globe featured an article over the weekend on the renewed emphasis on an iPod levy (ie. expansion of the private copying levy). While the article suggests that it is the music industry that is seeking the levy, it is more accurate to say that it is copyright collectives and some artists groups that are supportive of a levy expansion. CRIA argued against the applicability of the levy to iPods in 2007.
Copyright laws were once written to allow content creators to protect their work, but at an increasing rate copyright is used to carefully extract money from file-sharers. Some tracking companies go as far as leasing copyrights, with the sole intent of setting up a ‘honey pot’ for pirates.
There are many bands around the world who would rather not see their material getting exposure on file-sharing networks. Canadian band Great Lake Swimmers take a different view. File-sharing is “global word of mouth” they say, and are happy this so-called piracy has enabled them to become familiar to a wider audience.
As if his financial issues couldn’t get any worse, the CEO of Global Gaming Factory suffered yet another humiliating setback yesterday. After a tax debt of more of $110,000 went unpaid, enforcement officers swooped last night, repossessing Hans Pandeya’s car and a motorcycle.
Yesterday I posted on how security guards outside the Toronto copyright town hall demanded that the Canadian Federation of Students and NDP MP Olivia Chow stop distributing flyers discussing their positions on copyright. It turns out there is further fallout from the incident. Chow was distributing a flyer that included NDP MP Charlie Angus' interview with Exclaim! on copyright along with "count on me to speak out against Bill C-61 and anti-circumvention rules. I support stronger fair dealing." The Angus interview includes comments on the need for forward looking laws, the failed DMC, and the need to ways to monetize online activities.
While none of this is new – MPs like Angus and Chow have been saying this for months – it generated an incredible response from Alan Willaert, the Canadian representative of the American Federation of Musicians. Willaert sent the following email to representatives of virtually every major Canadian creator group:
Greetings to all.
I am attaching a flyer that was handed out by Olivia Chow at last night’s Copyright Town Hall meeting at the Royal York in Toronto. I am sure all of you will find its content equally as disgusting as I did.
In light of the fact that the NDP at its convention in Halifax this month dealt with a resolution identified as 6-21-09 Expanding Party Policy on “Supporting Canadian Creativity”, and showed clear support for “ensuring appropriate copyright protection so that creators are fairly compensated for their intellectual property”, I am shocked that both Chow and Charlie Angus are allowed to openly depart from party policy and directive, obviously just to shamelessly buy votes among young people and academics.
We intend on taking the NDP to task over this, and will accept nothing less than a retraction of Ms Chow’s statements and an apology.
Leaving aside the fact that some of those same creator groups spoke for stronger fair dealing with protection for parody at the town hall, it is incredible that we've reached the point that speaking against C-61 and for fair dealing is viewed by some groups as "disgusting" and requiring a retraction and apology.
Update: Charlie Angus responds to the demand for an apology: "Sorry, dude. . . it ain't happening."
By Sandra S. Park, Staff Attorney, ACLU Women’s Rights Project
Yesterday, the American Medical Association (PDF) and several other major medical and patient organizations (PDF) filed briefs in support of our lawsuit challenging the patents on two human genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer (the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes).
Why [...]
(Originally posted on Daily Kos.)
Yesterday, a day after we filed a lawsuit over the matter, DHS issued a new policy on laptop searches at the border. We were not impressed. The new policy imposes some limits on the claimed authority of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency but leaves intact its unconstitutional [...]
With the release of the OLC memos in May and Monday’s re-release of the CIA Inspector General’s (IG) torture report, it’s easy to get buried in the minutia of torture. But it’s through our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for details about the government’s torture and interrogation program that we’ve learned the [...]
CBC's Spark has posted video of a media scrum with Industry Minister Tony Clement following last night's town hall meeting. The full video is worth watching (embedded below), but I think the key comment comes toward the end when he discusses the timing of a new bill. In answer to the question "when can we expect the bill," he states "we're not quite sure. My personal target date was December 11th, but if it takes an extra couple of weeks or an extra couple of months to get the bill right, I'm also of that view too. So we have a target but we're not even at the tough stuff yet when you have draft and get something on paper." This comment suggests that the bill could easily slip until the spring of 2010, given that there has been no drafting, the consultation is still running, and the Minister has just opened the door to delaying into next year in order to get the bill right.
We blogged last week about RECAP, a Firefox plugin that lets PACER users share federal court documents through a repository hosted by the Internet Archive. There was some rumbling late last week when Paul Levy and the folks at RECAP noted that the federal courts had posted statements warning lawyers about security concerns associated with the plugin.
Over at the CL&P Blog, Levy reports that a representative of the federal courts contacted him this week to clarify that the Administrative Office of the United States Courts has no problem with lawyers using RECAP to share court documents:
I got a call this afternoon from Michel Ishakian, the Deputy Chief for
IT Policy and Budget at the Administrative Office of the United States
courts. She assured me that they have no problem with counsel using
RECAP (discussed here) and that the language sent out by the Northern District of Georgia (see my update to my previous post) is the only language that she disseminated for publication.
This is great news and largely consistent with the RECAP blog’s assessment of the situation after the security warnings first appeared:
[T]he court acknowledges the point we’ve made before: use of RECAP is consistent with the law and the PACER terms of use. The
only potential exception is if you’ve received a fee waiver for PACER.
In that case, use of RECAP could violate the terms of the fee waiver,
which reads: “Any transfer of data obtained as the result of a fee
exemption is prohibited unless expressly authorized by the court.”
We’re not lawyers, so we don’t know if the court’s interpretation is
correct, but we encourage our users to honor the terms of the fee
waiver.
For now, anyway, it seems clear now that the federal court system has no objection to ordinary fee paying attorneys using RECAP to share documents for free. Three cheers for the government doing the right thing here.