I don’t want to get all patriotic on you or anything, but I came across a couple of tributes to our home and native land (okay — my home and native land anyway) and they were sufficiently funny and yet true at the same time that I couldn’t help but take note of them. One was a guest post on the Queen of Spain’s blog by Meg Fowler, and while it’s entitled “Ten Things That Are Better About Canada,” it isn’t really about why we’re better than the U.S. or anywhere else, I don’t think — just why things are pretty darn good. My favourites include:

– Our national bird is tastier than yours.

– We know the secret to feeling rich — turn all your currency into gold-coloured coins!

– Our national flag is a leaf and two bars — something you can find in any town we have, too.

– We have more trees than we have McDonalds. And more hockey rinks than Wal-Marts. And more donuts than cops.

Nice job, Meg. And the other piece was a guest column in the National Post by a U.S. executive named Dave Burwick, who is leaving his tour of duty in Canada to head back to the U.S. and came up with his own list of things he loves about this country, including some thoughts about how hockey is a metaphor for our culture (and no, it doesn’t have anything to do with Don Cherry, thank God). Some selections:

– Hockey Night in Canada: One of the last communal TV events left anywhere.

– Eating a peameal sandwich every Saturday at 7 a. m. during my son’s hockey practice.

– Raising a family right in the middle of the city, and knowing they’re safe.

– Surviving a minus-30-degree day in downtown Winnipeg, and how it made me feel more alive.

I took a bike ride this afternoon through the Rouge River valley and into Pickering, out to Frenchman’s Bay — where some people were sunbathing, some were kite-surfing in the shadow of the giant Pickering nuclear plant, and some were sailing or kayaking — and along the way I saw hundreds of people walking, biking, picnicking, playing football, throwing a Frisbee, and just generally having a great time on a beautiful day. They were many different shades, from pale white to off-white to various shades of brown and black; some were wearing shorts, some dresses, some salwar kameez and some the hijab and chador and even burqa. And they were all Canadian. Happy Canada Day.

Six months after it was first scheduled to hit the legislature, the government’s proposed copyright law was tabled in the House this morning, giving critics a first look at the law that they have been rallying against for the better part of two years. Although Industry Minister Jim Prentice is trying to rally support for the bill by calling it a “made-in-Canada” solution, prominent opponents such as law professor Michael Geist have made it clear they believe most of the new law’s features have been dictated by outside interests — including the global record industry, U.S. movie studios and other foreign content industries — and have called it “a carbon copy of the DMCA.”

The truth is that the proposed legislation is somewhere in between — in good and bad ways. There are areas in which the Canadian law differs dramatically from the U.S. DMCA — most notably, the use of a so-called “notice and notice” approach when it comes to the liability of Internet service providers for copyright-infringing content, as opposed to the U.S. “notice and takedown” approach. The U.S. law has been criticized by many for effectively forcing services such as YouTube to remove content even when it’s not clear whether it actually infringes copyright, such as when it could fall under the “fair use” exception in the law (Canada has a similar, but more restrictive, concept called “fair dealing”).

Another element of the proposed Canadian law is that the personal (or “non-commercial”) liability for infringement has been reduced from $20,000 per infringement to just $500 — and that’s for each case brought by a copyright holder, even if it involves multiple offences; the existing legislation provides for damages of $20,000 per file. It’s important to note, however, that the reduction doesn’t apply if the person doing the infringing has cracked, broken or otherwise gotten around any digital-rights management controls on the content. Those cases would still be open to the $20,000 per infringement damages that are in the current law.

These “anti-circumvention” provisions are one of the most criticized elements in the new legislation, since some technology advocates argue that they will effectively criminalize behaviour that is essentially harmless, such as a user transferring songs from Apple’s iTunes software (which uses the company’s proprietary DRM technology) to some other format that makes them easier to play on a different device. Red Hat founder Bob Young has also criticized these kinds of restrictions because they could turn hackers and other technology experimenters into criminals, and potentially retard the development of new software in Canada.

In a post on his blog, Michael Geist says that the anti-circumvention rules in Canada’s law are actually worse than in the DMCA. “The law creates a blanket prohibition on circumvention with very limited exceptions and creates a ban against distributing the tools that can be used to circumvent,” he says. “The effect of these provisions will be to make Canadians infringers for a host of activities that are common today including watching out-of-region-coded DVDs, copying and pasting materials from a DRM’d book, or even unlocking a cellphone.”

One of the biggest sticking points in the legislation, as Geist notes on his blog, is the part that applies to personal infringment. According to past rulings by the Federal Court and statements by the federal Copyright Board, downloading music — even copyrighted music from peer-to-peer networks — appears to be legal, in part because the Canadian Private Copying Levy allows Canadians to make copies for their own personal use, regardless of where the original comes from. In order to launch a lawsuit against an individual, the copyright holder or their agent also has to identify the person doing the downloading by getting their ISP to reveal personal information about them. Past attempts by the Canadian Recording Industry Association to get ISPs to do this have failed.

It’s also worth noting that this copyright legislation is just one of the fronts the government is working on when it comes to protecting the interests of U.S. content companies: there’s also the secretive Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which is a multi-country effort to create laws that would extend the powers of border guards — allowing them to seize devices that are suspected of containing copyright infringing materials, for example — and would also force ISPs to reveal the identities of even suspected infringers without requiring a court order.

To say that the response to the proposed legislation has been mixed would be an understatement: while the Business Software Alliance put out a statement praising the new law, saying it would help to create jobs and stimulate the economy, the Canadian Music Creators Coalition has dismissed the effort as lame and backward-looking.

“As we feared, this bill represents an American-style approach to copyright. It’s all locks and lawsuits,” said Safwan Javed, the drummer for the band Wide Mouth Mason and a member of the CMCC. “Rather than building a made-in-Canada proposal to help musicians get paid, the government has chosen to import American-style legislation that says the solution to the music industry’s problems is suing our fans. Suing fans won’t make it 1992 again. It’s a new world for the music business and this is an old approach.”

“Who gains from this bill?” asked CMCC member Brendan Canning, co-founder of Broken Social Scene, in a statement released by the coalition. “It’s not musicians. Musicians don’t need lawsuits, we don’t need DRM protection. These aren’t the things that help us or our careers. What we do need is a government that is willing to sit down with all the stakeholders and craft a balanced copyright policy for Canada that will not repeat the mistakes made in the United States.”

(Note: This is cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

Are you sure that all of the songs on your iPod were legally acquired? What about the music or movies or other digital content on your laptop? You could be subjected to some nasty questioning next time you cross the border, if a new international trade body has its way — and your ISP might decide to rat you out to the government as well.

According to a leaked document (available at Wikileaks and also at IP Justice), Canada and a number of other countries are planning to create a NAFTA-style body that would police copyright, and would be empowered to seize and/or destroy property without a court order. This agency — whose creation wouldn’t have to be approved by the legislature, according to some reports, because it deals with international trade matters — would also have the power to force Internet service providers to divulge information about their customers without requiring a warrant.

Past attempts by the Canadian record industry to compel ISPs to produce such information failed when the courts ruled that the Canadian Recording Industry Association didn’t have the authority to request that kind of private personal data.

The proposed multi-country agreement (which reportedly involves the U.S., Canada, the European Union, Japan, Mexico and South Korea) is called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA. In addition to the ability to force ISPs to provide customer info, the agreement would also give border guards the right to inspect laptops, cameras, iPods and other devices for any illegal digital content, and would allow them to take action without requiring a complaint from a rights-holder. The agreement would permit guards and others to conduct “ex parte” searches of property or individuals, meaning a lawyer would not have to be present.

The agreement contains a clause allowing governments to shut down even non-commercial infringing sites, a clause which has become known as “the Pirate Bay killer,” after the popular file-sharing service based in Sweden, which is currently being sued by the major record companies and movie studios for copyright infringement. According to at least one analysis, many of the assumptions on which the ACTA is based are flawed. Others have argued that copyright law itself needs to be re-engineered to take account of the spread of digital content.

Michael Geist, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, says that the proposed agreement would “strike at the very heart of every day activities for millions of Canadians.” He has written on his blog about the problems with the ACTA proposal, including posts here, here and here. The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic made a submission to the federal government with its criticisms of the proposed agreement, which can be found online (PDF document).

The ACTA agreement is separate from new federal copyright legislation, which Geist says could be coming as early as next week, and is also expected to clamp down on a wide range of behaviour involving digital content — in much the same way that the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA does. The bill was originally supposed to be tabled last fall, but was withdrawn by the government after a storm of protest, including a prominent Facebook group set up by Prof. Geist that eventually gathered more than 40,000 members.

If you’re an Apple fan who has been waiting for the iPhone — or at least an “official” version of the iPhone — for lo, these many months, your heart probably leaped at the word from Rogers Communications supremo Ted Rogers this morning that he has signed a deal with Apple to launch a maple-flavoured version of the world’s most sought-after handset. If you have ever had a cellular data plan from Rogers, however, your heart probably leaped a little less high, and may even have let out a small sigh or shrugged its heart-shaped shoulders.

Why? Because as more than one person has pointed out, the fact that the iPhone is coming to Canada isn’t really the important thing. It’s important, of course, but everyone knew that it was going to arrive eventually. The *really* important thing is what it’s going to cost when it finally arrives — and not so much the phone itself, but the data plan. Will the word “unlimited” be used in conjunction with the word “data?” And if it is, will it actually mean “unlimited,” or will it mean something else that only appears in that special Rogers’ dictionary?

The nightmare scenario is that the iPhone comes, but the costs for service are so prohibitive — not so much for phone calls, but for data charges, Web surfing and so on — that it makes it ridiculous for anyone but a movie star or possibly a dentist to actually afford. Rogers and Bell are notorious for adding charges that boost even the most normal cellular bill into the stratosphere, especially when the user goes onto that thing called the “Internet” and does stuff with a regular app as opposed to the crippled WAP browser that most devices come with.

These are just the kinds of activities that iPhone users tend to engage in, of course — which is why Ted and the gang are so excited about getting them here, and even more excited that they will only work on the Rogers network. For me, I’d be a lot more excited if there was a reasonable data and Web-surfing plan attached to it.

(cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

As the federal government draws closer to introducing a new copyright law — a proposed update was expected before Christmas but was withdrawn at the last minute, after a vocal protest> involving a Facebook group set up by University of Ottawa law professor and fair copyright advocate Michael Geist, as well as other activity — various groups are jockeying for position.

The latest entry is a formal “platform” statement from the Creators Copyright Coalition, an alliance of 19 professional associations representing writers, musicians, actors and other performers whose work appears in print, on stage, on TV and radio, in movies and in galleries. The document isn’t online at the CCC website (at least as far as I can tell), but there is a copy of the platform here.

From the looks of the copyright coalition’s platform, its vision of the future is one in which everyone pays more in fees, and Internet providers are liable for any copyright infringement that is transmitted over their networks. Among other things (including a request that schools pay a fee to put on plays, something they are currently entitled to do for free), the coalition wants artists to have the explicit right to forbid — or to charge money for — the transfer of their work to another medium.

The CCC’s platform also wants the private copying levy, which adds a charge to the purchase of every blank CD in order to reimburse artists for illegal copying, expanded to include not just music but visual art, video, written content and other forms of art. The coalition recommends that “new tariffs be levied for the new categories.”

Finally, the group says that it would be “only fair” to require Internet service providers or ISPs to “assume the responsibilities” of ensuring that content on their networks doesn’t infringe copyright. The CCC recommends that Canada adopt a notice-and-takedown process similar to that used by the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, making the ISPs liable for infringement.

Note: The federal Privacy Commissioner has some concerns about the copyright legislation as well — in particular, the fact that some digital-rights management or DRM tools used by content companies can record information about people’s behaviour, in breach of privacy protections, as well as the fact that a “notice and notice” process being contemplated as part of the law for ISPs would require those ISPs to retain information about their users, in contravention of privacy laws.