I don’t think it’ll ever be published, in print or on the web, but I had to say something. I’ve also contacted my MP and the Right Honourable American Biotch, Jim Prentice. This is what I have to say:

No, these proposed changes won’t change a thing. They’ll merely make things that us ground-level Canadians do illegal.

The problem with the bill isn’t that it wants to combat piracy. That’s fine. Piracy is bad. If we want free stuff, we can create it ourselves and release it under a free license.

The problem is that it makes transferring my music (that I bought) or my movies (that I bought) to a device illegal if the content provider has placed any sort of digital restriction on it.

This gives corporations the power over my rights. They can grant me (if they wish) to power to copy, but of course they don’t because they want to sell me a copy for each device I own, not a copy I can copy myself. The legislation purportedly protects these rights, but in fact does an end-run around them.

Of course the law won’t stop copying files. This is what digital media is about: Cheap reproduction. And digital restrictions are fundamentally flawed and will always be circumvented. So Canadians will still be doing what they like with the media they paid for, but now it will become illegal to do so.

This legislation stinks of being written by American corporate and governmental interests. This isn’t the Canada I know, where we simply kowtow to our American cousins. It offends me (as a person who voted for the Conservatives), and if this law passes, I will find somewhere better to place my vote.

Amen.

Copyright is an important idea. It’s a big deal. It allows people to make money off what they create, in order to spur on even more creation. It’s a good idea, and it has worked for a long time, in the favour of a few.

Copyright is an important idea, but it’s flawed. Or at the very least, modern conceptions of copyright are flawed. Most people seem to think that when you create something, like an idea, or a book, or a song, or a collection of poems, that you own what you have created. It’s like property. This is, I think, flawed; it’s very evidently not property. Since the beginning of the printing press, as the costs to make and market a book have been declining toward zero, this notion has become increasingly irrelevant.

Yes, at one time a book was a very valuable thing, something time-consuming to make in every way. From the paper to the ink to the copying. Now, with the rise of electronics, books are not only declining in function as blogs and aggregators begin to supplant them, but the cost of making and distributing a book comes down to merely how much time you want to spend making and distributing it.

You can write and distribute an entire book, essentially for free. And the spare time you spend writing it, what is that worth? Who knows. The time that would otherwise be used sitting around or watching television or attending football games; can that time be reliably said to have monetary value? There’s a strong argument that it cannot.

The cost of making quite a few different things is now approaching zero, things that, when copyright was first implemented, cost an arm and a leg. Back then, we needed incentive to create culture, because creating culture was expensive. Some things still are. Major motion pictures, for instance. Broadway productions. Football games.

Secondly, copyright is not opt-in. It should be. The Berne Convention is–at least on this issue–a bit of an idiotic bit of Nanny State hand-holding that needs to be done away with. Automatic copyrights are a bad thing: a lot of the stuff that gets published is not worth copyrighting. A lot of the people that publish on the web don’t even care.

For the people who really do care about having their work copyrighted, let them bring it in to a copyright office and have their copy notarised. Let them pay an administrative fee. Think about it: copyright law protects even those who don’t care about copyright law. I pay for it through my tax money. But why? Why should I be paying to uphold the rights of those who may not even care whether their work is ripped off?

Let them pay for the costs of administering copyright, those people that care enough about what they have created to have copyright cover them. I don’t want to bear that cost.

Third, copyright lasts too long. Look, I don’t have a problem with Disney keeping copyrights to stuff that they try to foist on its customers every time there’s a format change. Let them keep the in perpetuity, if they can demonstrate that they actually use that copyright to generate revenue. But, also, let’s make them pay a fee to get copyright renewal every ten years, on an inclining scale. If they really want the copyright that badly, well, they should pay for it.

Everything else, all those records and books and articles and photos that no one cares about, let that stuff slip into the public domain. Let people use them for whatever they like. That, my friends, will be an explosion of creativity. Imagine being able to take some obscure artist that you think is an absolute gem but pretty much everyone else has forgotten and remix his records and re-release them. Or whatever else you can imagine.

Fourth, let’s make it very clear that the reason things enter the public domain is because they were always part of the public domain to begin with. That is to say, culture and its products cannot be owned by any particular person. Physical objects can, certainly, but not that thing that humans produce and call art simply because we’re human: no single person or entity can own that.

Copyright is like an exclusive license to use something for whatever purpose. Money, attention, goodwill, you name it. You get to use it for a set period of time, after which it goes back to people that–let’s face it–without whom you would never have been able to create that work to begin with.

Yes, copyright is a good idea. It still is, after all these years. Maybe the question we should be asking now, in the new millennium and beyond, is how do we make it better? How do we adjust copyright to optimally serve the needs and rights of copyright owners and at the same time serve the rights and needs of the public at large?