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I watched RiP: A Remix Manifesto (surprisingly) on an Air Canada flight. Its a great documentatary about copyright and its (significantly negative) impact on our creative freedom. I definitely recommend everyone check this one out.

• I recently became a member of the Pirate Party of Canada! I encourage everyone in Canada to consider joining up.
• A history of the Sweedish Pirate political party
• Open electronic access to research is become more and more critical for global research and scientific and technological progress.
• Neeber sent me this sweet anti-copying 10 minute propoganda from the 90s called Don’t Copy That Floppy.
• Finally, Eolas a company that recently sued microsoft for $585 million, is now suing 23 companies, including Apple, Google, Adobe, Amazon, eBay, Playboy, Yahoo, and YouTube for infringment of their 3rd party browser plug-in patent.

Hath hell frozen over? The RIAA (Recording Industry of America) will now pursue a “graduated response” to infringements which basically boil down to a Notice and Notice system (which is similar to what we have in Canada). This means that there won’t be any further out of the blue lawsuits. Those being sued will no doubt have plenty of warning that they are infringing.

• Meanwhile, the canadian recording industry wants to impose a tax on ISPs for music. Obviously a bad idea and here’s why.
• An update on whats going on with the recent CRTC hearings and Canadian copyright in general.
• The free-to-download Nine Inch Nails album (I posted ages ago on IA) tops Amazon’s mp3 sales chart.
• The US FCC nixes Big Media’s attempted control of the analog outputs on devices. Big Media wanted to be able to turn off analog out whenever they wanted meaning that they’d have total control over what you do with your own media and hardware.
• The WIPO (World International Property Organiztion) in a stunningly useful move is looking at how it can help 3rd world countries to reduce their environmental impact.
• The dreaded ACTA meetings (secretive Big Content and government meetings about global copyright) in Paris have concluded and the conclusion is: nothing. At least until March 09.
• As you’ve probably heard, iTunes Plus is now (basically) DRM Free. Hell Ya! Now all we need is CD quality downloads for all tracks and I’ll start buying my tracks from Apple for sure.
• A judge in the US has ruled that breathalizer source code must be made evidence in a court case between a drunk driving defendant and the state.
• EFF and FreeYouriPhone.org launch a site to try and get a DMCA exclusion for the iPhone so that they can hack it and install what they want.
• Finally, an Anti-File-Sharing Group in the US intends to pay ISPs to police their users. These guys have way too much money on their hands.

• BC’s ISO Hunt has preemptively sued the recording industry to prevent shutdown. Haven’t heard anything about this since the initial suit, it’ll be interesting to see how it all pans out.
• The Canadian Conservative’s platform includes pledge to push through copyright reform. Now that they are in (all be it tenuous) power, we’ll see if they can get this through parliament or not.
• Unknown to most people the major governments of the world are secretly working on a global copyright treaty called ACTA and Michael Geist has Canada wishlist.
• A Calgary man first to be charged for videotapping in a movie theatre, charged (the shockingly low amount of) $1500.
• Finally, Michael Geist has launched a new movie on copyright in Canada called “Why Copyright?“. Good stuff.

As has been expected for a few weeks, the follow up to the original Canadian Bill C-60 has been introduced into parliament (full Bill C61 if you are bored). It -is- a Canadian version of the terrible american DMCA, in fact: “…the takeaway is that the DMCA provisions are worse than the U.S. and the consumer exceptions riddled with limitations as the government promotes a strategy of locking down content and launching lawsuits against Internet users” according to Michael Geist (Canada’s foremost copyright expert). Some other scary quotes from Geist’s review:

• “Overall, these anti-circumvention provisions go far beyond what isneeded to comply with the WIPO Internet treaties and represents an astonishing abdication of the principles of copyright balance that have guided Canadian policy for many years.”
• “Canadians face $20,000 per infringement for transferring music from a copy-protected CD to their iPod.”

Geist’s Full Article. I’ll leave it up to you, but I know the first I’d be doing is writing a letter to your MP. Interestingly, within a few hours of the release of the Bill, I got an e-mail from the Canadian Music Creators Coalition denouncing the bill as terrible for musicians… so you know things must be bad!

Update:  An even easier way to contact your MP about this terrible terrible bill.

In less important copyright news:

• The US’s DMCA seems to be doing ooooh sooo well for them as: US Campuses flooded by RIAA notices for students.
• The creators of the original (and well done) Steal This Film have recently released Steal This Film II which also looks good!
• Does a third party WoW bot break Blizzard’s copyright laws?
• TorrentSpy has been ordered to pay $110million in damages to MPAA
• The venerable, dark and gifted Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has releases their album under creative commons license and you can download it lossless format! (though you do have to give them your e-mail address to download it)
• Probably the next biggest news is that the Canadian Recording Industry has ordered the shutdown of What.cd and several other Canadian BitTorrent sites. This will be an interesting story to watch.

If you didn’t notice the update to last time’s post and if you are fairly technically minded (ie. you want to jump through a few annoying hoops) then you can fairly easily get yourself a What.cd membership. If you love music, you owe it to yourself and the artists you love!

• A new canadian group called the Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright (BCBC) includes Google, Yahoo, Rogers, Telus, and the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and is fighting against draconian copyright laws proposed by the likes of CRIA and others.
• On the other side of the fense, the International Intellectual Property Alliance (aka the IIPA) have slammed Canada for our lax copyright laws.
• Ironically the current Canadian copyright laws are not giving money back to the original creators… as usual the money is going to others who leach off of the creators.
• A world leader in movie releases known as “maVen” has fled the Mounties.
• Amie Street is a new music distribution site that has an amazingly good business model and tons of independent artists are flocking to it.

We all know the US DMCA has done nothing good and lots bad for the citizens of the US. Well now the pressure is on for Canada to adopt a similar law. The only thing stopping it being put through government is the lack of majority. Michael Geist has a wrap-up of all the sordid details of the Canadian DMCA to-date.

• Canadian songwriters propose $5 fee to Broadband internet to compensate artists for downloaded songs which seems extremely weird considering that they were recently trying to remove the same fee on digital music players because it was allowing for legal P2P sharing.
• Don’t think copyright is out of control? Here’s a nice story of a charity forced to pay copyright fees so children can sing christmas carols.
• Here’s some terrific quotes from the CMCC (Canadian Music Creators Coalition): “According to Nielsen, Canadian sales of digital tracks in Canada increased 73%, well ahead of the 45% growth rate posted in the US. Digital album sales are up 93% in Canada while in the US they are up only 53%.” and “Artists do not want to sue music fans. The labels have been suing our fans against artists’ will, and laws enabling these suits cannot be justified in artists’ names” and “Artists do not support using digital locks to increase the labels’ control over the distribution, use and enjoyment of music or laws that prohibit circumvention of such technological measures. Consumers should be able to transfer the music they buy to other formats under a right of fair use, without having to pay twice”. Fuck yeah!
• A new US college funding act sails through congress even though it forces colleges to filter music and video sharing. Nice.
• The US Patent Reform Act of 2007 seems good generally but also gives safe harbour to approved patents.
• The proposed US Pro-IP act vastly increases fines for copying music and video. Copy a CD, owe a mere $1.5 million.

A top US law professor says that overly broad copyright protection has made the USA a nation of infringers. In a common example “By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing.”

• An idea we’ve seen time and time again in studies, a Canadian study finds that P2P downloaders buy more music: ““We estimate that the effect of one additional P2P download per month is to increase music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year.””
• The Big Content lobbying groups have asked Presidential Candidates for more restrictive copyright laws because “The future of our creative output in the United States is at stake in the 2008 presidential election”.
• While Demonoid in Canada has gotten a lot of press, the legal battle of QuebecTorrent is still raging and is really more interesting since they are actually fighting back.
• The MPAA’s University Copyright Toolkit allows colleges to easily install MPAA controlled RootKits on all their computers. In the ultimate irony, the Toolkit has now been taken down because Ubuntuu sent the MPAA a DMCA takedown notice since the Toolkit was written in linux and uses open-source libraries but does not provide its source code. You gotta love that!
• The DVD movie industry is tanking… could it be because Spiderman 3 and Fantastic 4 suck? Or because its easier, cheaper, faster and less of a hassle to download the AVI from torrents? All of the above!
• Finally, the Pirate Bay has canceled its Oink replacement which is really too bad, citing that other sites have already taken up the slack.

• The RIAA has finally figured out that the majority of pirated material is originally surfaced on Usenet… the problem is that limiting or censoring usenet is extremely difficult… so this is going to be a long, slow and brutal battle.
• The Pirate Bay is apparently not buying Sealand but is still looking around for an island to buy.
• Canada’s Patricia Neri, the Director General of Copyright Policy at Canadian Heritage has been removed from her position for Conflict of Interest reasons. Hopefully that means that we’ll see more balanced copyright laws in the up-coming proposals for new copyright law in canada.
• WIPO introduces children’s copyright law workbook. Seriously.
• The first RIAA file sharing trial (ever) to go to trial occurred last week. Inside the courtroom, is the RIAA really this much of a gongshow? Seems like people should have been taking this to court -way- sooner. Also of note, the RIAA admits they have lost millions on their lawsuits.
• A recent study finds that file-sharing has increased the exposure of independent artists “more albums from the independent labels appear on the charts, and those that appear survive longer than they had before. Releases from indie labels are still at a disadvantage compared to those from the majors, but the gap between them appears to have narrowed”.
• Yahoo Music has told the recording industry that they won’t sell music with DRM ever again. Yehaw!
• Socan (Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada) wants to tax digital music downloads. I can’t believe how dumb these people are… the reason for the tax? Piracy. The tax is to be fed back to artists to compensate them for music piracy. But didn’t we just talk about this a few weeks ago… wasn’t SOCAN fighting against taxes on Digital Audio Players specifically because it made it quasi-legal to pirate music? Whats the difference? Idiots!

CRIA (the Canadian version of the RIAA) has done an about-face on media and mp3 player levvies. They are now lobbying hard against the levvies that they have profited from for several years. Why have they changed their tune? Well they are saying its because people think that once they pay the levy they are free to do whatever they want with music and videos. Of course, Canadians in-the-know already know that in Canada there is no law against copying digital media no matter what the copyright. Sharing of that media with others is a little murkier of course.

• Good Copy / Bad Copy a super good documentary on copyright and the copying of media has been released for free on torrents.
• The vile stink of AACS DRM ravages Vista… will it ravage OSX next?
• If you’re still using eDonkey or eMule you may have noticed that all the major German eDonkey servers (and thus all the good servers) have been shut down. Apparently a German court has filed an injunction for copyright infringement against the hosts and all the servers have come down.
• Super interesting and fucking fantastic (if true) story about how DRM may be illegal in Canada if it collects private information (and almost all does). If true this would seriously fuck up almost all video and music download and streaming sites in Canada.
• The MPAA and RIAA are too lazy / stupid to control their own content, now they want ISPs to do the filtering work for them… never mind about freedom of speech. We’re going to continue to hear about this for a loooong long time into the future.