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.

I have a solution to illegal downloading.

See, the problem with DVDs is they’re just too small. 4gb or so, once you image the disc. This means that at an average downloading speed of 100kb/s, it’s just a few hours before you can have downloaded the image and burned the image to your own DVDR. Include uploading to keep your ratios cool, and it’s about a day in total, most of which is unattended and non-labour-intensive.

So you need to plan ahead; so what? You just download more movies and games than you could ever watch or play and you’ve done your planning ahead until you inevitably watch and play more than you thought you could. (I am, of course, speaking hypothetically; I don’t actually do any of these things.)

The disc’s capacity is too small. What you need is a disc whose content is more in the range of 20-30gb. Couple that with the glacier-like expansion of bandwidth in the US, and Bob’s your uncle.

Then, when bandwidth catches up, you simply release a disc with ten times as much content. Make the sound so crystal clear, make the picture so very high-definition that the human eye can no longer tell the difference for any practical purpose. The beautiful thing is you, the content-producing company, get to make two kinds of money: people won’t pirate the full discs of your film because it’s prohibitively bandwidth-intensive, and because of your clever planned obsolescence, everyone will have to buy their content all over again.

This is, of course, much better than viable alternatives, like allowing your customers to download films at a reasonable price and burn them to disc as they choose, because instead of costing next to nothing (you could, after all, get your customers to use their own bandwidth for this, as they already do that), it costs billions in switch-over costs. Which is good, because if there wasn’t some pointless change-over in disc types and the associated format wars that come with them, what in the world would I blog about?

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?

From an Ars Technica story, comes these ten inconvenient “truths” per the IFPI.

1. Pirate Bay, one of the flagships of the anti-copyright movement, makes thousands of euros from advertising on its site, while maintaining its anti-establishment “free music” rhetoric.

Probably. But to clarify, do the profit from it, or do they simple make enough money to cover the server and bandwidth related stuff? That’d be a nice question to answer. In any case, tPB’s rhetoric is its own, and I doubt many people who use it to facilitate their downloading actually care about the rhetoric.

2. AllOfMP3.com, the well-known Russian web site, has not been licensed by a single IFPI member, has been disowned by right holder groups worldwide and is facing criminal proceedings in Russia.

True. AllofMP3 is pretty much a skank joint, and if you’re buying music from them, you might as well just download it via The Pirate Bay.

3. Organized criminal gangs and even terrorist groups use the sale of counterfeit CDs to raise revenue and launder money.

This may be true, though who really knows. In any case, physical piracy is another beast altogether from digital piracy, and I’m not sure why it’s included on the list. You might remember that no one really (with the exception of the Pirate Bay and the people who index trackers) makes any money from digital piracy.

4. Illegal file-sharers don’t care whether the copyright-infringing work they distribute is from a major or independent label.

Doubtful, but what’s the point here? That people aren’t all a bunch of RIAA-boycotting freedom fighters? Sure. Free music is free music.

5. Reduced revenues for record companies mean less money available to take a risk on “underground” artists and more inclination to invest in “bankers” like American Idol stars.

Absolute hogwash of the worst kind. Record labels are some of the most conservative companies in the world. They’ve always been reticent to develop new artists vs milking cash cows, from the 1930s to today. If piracy went away this very minute, they’d still be doing it, because they’re entrenched companies and are scared of change.

6. ISPs often advertise music as a benefit of signing up to their service, but facilitate the illegal swapping on copyright infringing music on a grand scale.

Good, shoot the messenger. Is it not true that bandwidth providers also facilitate people downloading from iTunes and its ilk as well? Clearly these monsters must be stopped!

7. The anti-copyright movement does not create jobs, exports, tax revenues and economic growth–it largely consists of people pontificating on a commercial world about which they know little.

And here, ladies and gentlemen, is why so many people hate labels and copyright organisations. Because they don’t like anything that comes between their hand and your pocket. They don’t like piracy because it costs them money. They don’t like the internet because it makes sharing trivial and breaks up the cartel on physical distribution. They don’t like copyleft and Creative Commons because you generally don’t have to pay for these things, and because if there’s an ecosystem of free music out there, that means less revenue for the labels.

8. Piracy is not caused by poverty. Professor Zhang of Nanjing University found the Chinese citizens who bought pirate products were mainly middle- or higher-income earners.

Are you telling me that poor Chinese farmers with a subsistence living aren’t interested in downloading music from the internet? I’m socked. Shocked!

9. Most people know it is wrong to file-share copyright infringing material but won’t stop till the law makes them, according to a recent study by the Australian anti-piracy group MIPI.

This is partly true. The reality is, however, that even laws won’t stop them, because guess what, there are simply too many people for the law to deal with. Even in the US, where the most strict laws ever are in effect and the most piracy happens. Period. PS: A study by a group with a particular bias comes out supporting that particular bias? You. Don’t. Say.

10. P2P networks are not hotbeds for discovering new music. It is popular music that is illegally file-shared most frequently.

Which is what the labels fear the most. The most popular music is their cash-cow. Their big revenue stream. They don’t actually care about independent music as you might think from point number 4. What they actually care about is money. Pure, hard cash. And they’ll do anything (from suing their own customers to lobbying and bribing the US congress and by extension the world to making ever so slightly deceitful lists of “truths” to support their viewpoints) to make sure that these cash-cows are protected.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. If you can get away with selling crap to people for $20 a pop, by all means, it’s a free country. But if it stops becoming a free country because you want to protect a revenue stream instead of inventing new revenue streams, then at least let’s stop wrapping the truth up in frilly pink dresses.

I mean, record labels can call pirates leeches who eat from their revenue streams, and the pirates can call labels leeches who bottomfeed off culture itself, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a binary issue where one side is right and the other wrong.

Call a spade a spade: they’re both wrong, they’re both scum, and they both deserve to disappear, both labels and pirates.

Just a few things.

• Google is full of very smart people. Very, very smart people. They don’t make blindingly stupid moves that anyone can poke holes in with the most rudimentary questions; if you think you’ve done that, re-examine your question.
• Google essentially got YouTube for free in light of the fact they (internally) believe Google’s stock is overvalued. See, they traded stocks is what they did - this isn’t a cash transaction - and I’m betting a lot of people inside Google think the stock is more than 100% overvalued. 1.6b$ may sound like a lot right now, but Google itself is probably looking at the purchase in terms of percent of market cap (the purchase ringing in at a not-so-stunning 1% or so).
• Google still has deep pockets. They could be litigated by practically everyone and still have deep pockets. But understand this: Google providing a massive new target for those litigants is not a bad thing. It’s a very, very good thing for several reasons:
  1. Google can defend itself. YouTube could not. If YouTube had been sued, it would probably have gone under. Google? Not a chance.
  2. Litigation is in a sense simply moderated debate; precident is setting the timbre of the debate, and Google has a chance to control that dialogue now. What is the future of copyright law in regards to online, user-created content? YouTube didn’t have a snowball’s chance of helping define that debate. Google does. As it has already in so many other areas.
  3. YouTube was always a question mark in my mind. It was vaguely protected by the DCMA, since the site took down offending material when it was asked. But it was a small company hosting an incredible amount of data, just waiting to be either toppled or bought out. And as I hoped, it was bought out.
• Everyone keeps saying that there’s no “business model” for YouTube. But don’t you see? This is exactly the problem this aquisition solves. Google is an advertiser in search of places to put adverts; YouTube is a site with an incredible number of pages and users in search of a business model. This isn’t very hard to understand (Steve Balmer, I’m looking at you), and anyone who purports to be intelligent and still tried to play the “business model” card is either lying about his intelligence or being disingenuous.
• Google already has experience in the internet video arena. They’ve got Google Video which has everything you might want from a video site except for, you know, viewers. YouTube has viewers. There is a synergy to be had here - and I don’t mean that as a buzzword - but not simply between the two video sites, but also with Google’s other offerings. Video, obvious. Search, obvious. But what about GDS? What about Calendar? What about Gmail? What about Reader? The possibilities are almost endless.
• Google owns internet video now, do you understand that? Not only does this enhance their search engine - as they own the data, making crawling it all that easier - but Google can assure their advertising partners that when someone hits up Google Video Search they are going to the best resource on the web, bar none, a quality that ensures more pagehits, and more adclicks.

And those are just a few thoughts. I may add more.

If you follow this link to Grokster.com, you’ll notice the rather heavy-handed use of Javascript - a javascript that will (gasp!) show you your own IP address. Yes, hooray, you now know the address of my anonymous proxy…

Anyhow, this is how the site reads: The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal. Copying copyrighted motion picture and music files using unauthorized peer-to-peer services is illegal and is prosecuted by copyright owners.

Did you know that this is wrong? In fact, it’s not illegal to trade copyrighted material if the author has authorised it for that use. It’s illegal - in the US, at least - to trade copyrighted material if the authors or “owners” of the content don’t want you to.

But the larger question is this. Why should I care? This is and industry that thrives (and not just gets by, but thrives) on songs glorifying every sort of illegal action, from murder to theft to rape and back again. And they’re not simply the middle-men in this. Labels create acts that glorify crimes, and promote those acts, and sell their records and anything else they can slap a pricetag on. The big four|five labels are dirty, top to bottom.

You wonder why people don’t mind downloading an album? Because it’s not really theft, and anyone can see that. But also, the populace can smell the hypocracy.

dan