hughmcguire.net

Humans are gone. The city remains. 23 Skidoo is a beautiful and chilling 1964 short, by Julian Biggs, from the NFB’s beta screening room. Wonderful sound track (Kathleen Shannon and Ted Haley) to go along with the lonely images.

For those wondering, “23 skidoo” is a slang term from the 1910s meaning, more or less, to leave suddenly (so says Wikipedia in any case).

The National Film Board of Canada has launched their beta player, with a cornucopia of wonderful documentaries, shorts, animations and abstract films. Established in 1938, and then reincarnated in the 1950s, the NFB was one of those great Canadian enterprises from a time when Canada was interested in doing new and challenging things. The NFB explored new territory and set the standard in documentary-making and animation. So we applaud their efforts to get these treasures in front of people again. Congrats to Matt & the team.

Here are some of my recommendations:

• Golden Gloves, Gilles Groulx, 1961, 27 min 43 sec
  A beautiful documentary about a young black Montreal boxer, Ronald Jones, and others in the Golden Gloves competition. Main problem: this is the English dubbed version, not the original French. wtf?
• Bill Reid, Jack Long, 1979, 27 min 50 sec
  A film about Haida sculptor, Bill Reid.
• Le merle, Norman McLaren, 1958, 4 min 39 sec
  The master experimental animator, playing with a Quebec folk song.
• Debout sur leur terre, Maurice Bulbulian, 1983, 54 min 19 sec
  Life in three Inuit villages in Quebec.

And of course, The Big Snit:

See some more recommendations at MetaFilter.

1. finishing novels
2. a fine scotch to celebrate finishing novels

Evan just launched an open source twitterish thing called identi.ca. He’s got tons of traction in a few short days (that surely have been long for Evan and the rest of the crack team at Controlez-Vous), including lots of interest from luminaries such as Dave Winer, Tm O’Reilly and others. So: first, a big kudos to Evan.

Identi.ca also has its pooh poohers, including the knife sharpeners at TechCrunch, who wrote a lukewarm piece called The Problem with Identi.ca Is That It’s Not Twitter. And that’s been pretty much the line of those less than impressed: It’s got fewer features, why bother, everyone is on Twitter, why would they leave, and: who cares if it’s open source, it still needs to be good. etc.

Which speaks of breathtaking short-sightedness, not to mention, a total erasure of the last, oh, half-decade plus of the most recent Internet history.

So here is my take: Identi.ca is not an alternative service to Twitter; it’s an open microblogging platform. That’s a huge difference.

(OK, identi.ca is an alternative service, and laconi.ca is the open microblogging platform behind it, but for the sake of this article lets say they are the same thing).

It’s not difficult to find salient parallels, either. Biz Stone and Ev Williams’ pre-Twitter project (before Odeo) was Blogger. A great platform for making blogs. But it turned out that an open source version, Wordpress, was far more powerful, versatile, and compelling. Bloogger is still popular and still a good solution for many people. Wordpress though turned into something different, and arguably much more important.

Will identi.ca be as successful as Wordpress? Who knows, but if you think that microblogging is important, then *something* like identi.ca will be successful, and it’s the best candidate so far, that I know of. Again, it’s not a service; it’s a platform (and an open one at that).

Let me give two small examples:

Mobile Microblogging in the Developing World

I met Joel Selanikio, a doctor, epidemiologist, and software developer, at the Stockholm Challenge, where Joel’s project, EpiSurveyor won in the Health category. Here is a short description of EpiSurveyor: an open source mobile phone platform for collecting health & epidemiological data, which is being implemented by the World Health Org among others (which gives great cost and efficiency improvements over both paper/pencil- the usual method - and expensive commercial software & consulting).

Joel and I had some great discussions about mobile as a platform in the developing world: ie, why spend money on OLPC in the developing world, when every teacher already has a computer in their pocket … a mobile phone. The smart thing to do is to develop applications for the “network-connected minicomputers” people already have, namely: phones. Let’s develop for the tools that exist rather than the ones we’d like to imagine.

We also talked about Twitter as a web platform for mobile communications; interestingly, Joel thought Twitter was puzzling (I’m putting that mildly, I think he said it was a waste of time!), whereas for me - other than the time-wasting/communication aspect, Twitter is compelling as a platform for developing web-based/mobile enabled communications, the specifics of which I can’t put my finger upon. One example that I provided was the Tower Bridge Twitter stream in London. This is a trivial little project that scrapes the web for info on when the bridge is opening/closing and what ships are sailing through. The example itself is irrelevant; the point is that one can imagine useful bits of information being transmitted to your mobile device in such a way.

Here are some interesting facts:

• many/most people in developing countries have mobile phones
• many/most people in developing countries DON”T have: computers & high bandwidth net access
• mobile phone-enabled microblogging tools might be the perfect platform for information distribution/communication in such a place
• a microblogging tool could be used for any number of useful things, beyond “just” the run-of-mill social communication, eg:
  • price discovery, for say exchange rates, market prices
  • boil water alerts
  • traffic reports
  • education (say, informing parents of homework? still wondering about this one…)
  • health alerts
  • news headline distribution
  • who knows what else?

Identi.ca can become a development platform to do all this, and much more that you and I can’t think of. Luckily there are 5 billion people on the planet who will be able to take identi.ca/laconi.ca and build/improve upon them. While Twitter, Plurk, Pownce and all the rest are constrained because they are just closed services, that do only what their owners wish them to do.

Archiving Links, and Search Rank

Here is another area of significant interest. I wrote a while ago lamenting that Twitter has replaced del.icio.us for me as a place to archive interesting links. While Twitter does a good job of letting me share interesting links with friends immediately, it doesn’t serve as a useful archive in the way del.icio.us does. So that means:

1. unless I post twice, I lose a structured archive of links I found useful
2. because of ubiquitous use of URL-shortening services in Twitter, the web is also losing the significant work of URL-sorting/ranking that we used to do by blogging about interesting links, and putting them into del.icio.us (etc).

The other night, I had dinner with Larry Sanger (thanks for the invite, Mike), and Larry was batting around some compelling ideas about opening up the search space.

And that had me stewing about things, thinking about Identi.ca and my problems with Twitter and (no longer) archiving my links. It would be “easy” to do this in identi.ca, by specifiying:

• that this identi.ca post contains a link (this can be inferred by the existence of a url)
• that i want to structure it somehow - eg using #hashtags
• that i wish to archive this - ie an RSS stream of my categorized links, that could easily be fungible with a more centralized or decentralized bookmark depository (del.icio.us or other) …

You’d also want the system to keep track of the true link, rather than the shortened on.

This is not just more useful to me, but Important in how the web/google/searches assign value to different URLs.

Now, theoretically all this could happen at Twitter. But Twitter is a company, with a few guys and (apparently, gasp) ONE mysql database (with two slaves). They have enough problems just keeping the fail whale at sea.

Identi.ca, on the other hand, belongs to us all … and if I had the chops and the interest (I have the latter but not the former, and not the time) I could code something up that would do the trick, and pitch it to Evan, or install my own identi.ca instance on my server doing what I want it to do.

Summary: Identi.ca is important because it is a microbloggin development platform; not because it is an alternative to Twitter. Whether or not identi.ca and the open source codebase laconi.ca succeed I can’t predict. But something like this *will* succeed because mobile-enabled microblogging might just be the most compelling new communications space, especially in the developing world where access to mobile phones is almost ubiquitous, while access to computers and bandwidth is limited.

[Incidentally, and as an aside, all this has much to do with why I thought Steve’s comments on my iphone post were off-base … there may be many people who lament that their shiny gadgets are too expensive, but given all this above, it’s clear that there is much exciting work to be done in mobile web, much of it important, and with crappy data plans Canadians are excluded from this area of innovation, which is what pisses me off - luckily, tools like identi.ca mean we webbers have a new development tool to do interesting things in the space].

From NY Times:

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners….

[more…]

I’ve been thinking a fair bit lately about the disconnect between the “wealth” of the West in the past 30 or 40 years, and actual “reality.” I argued here that our wealth is a fantasy because: it is based on unsustainably cheap credit (most famously the subprime mess, but endemic throughout the economy), and “exporting” poverty and cheap labour/manufacturing to other countries, notably China. And my larger point was that the fundamental principle of our modern economy, limitless growth, can’t be viable in the long term. I don’t know what that means, but it’s scary.

There has been some work done that establishes the geographic footprint of the average North American, that is, the amount of land (including land for water, food, energy etc) needed to support your average North American life. This data suggests that in 1900 the average was about 2 acres per person, by 1950. 5 acres per person and in 1995, 12 acres per person. I’d be willing to be that in 2008 we’re up around 18-20 acres… does anyone have any recent data?

One thing I notice just in my family is how little value things have compared to when I was a kid. We buy things now with the intention of throwing them out; that wasn’t the case 25 years ago; certainly not 50 years ago. So what’s changed? Culture plays a role, but the underlying reason for the cultural shift is that the relative cost of “things” compared with our incomes has been dropping steadily. Part of that has to do with better technologies, the efficiencies that come with global trade, but just as significant is the cheap credit and exportation of poverty/cheap manufacturing that’s been fueling our economy recently.

That got me thinking about the people behind all this. And I have a question: how many people work full time to sustain the average North American individual.

That is, given, say a yearly income of, say. $70,000, what is the equivalent number of people working around the world to produce all the things that such an individual buys in the course of a year?

For instance:
-Joe buys 10 shirts, 5 pairs of pants, 2 pairs of shoes, and one jacket a year.
-For each item, what is the total number of human hours of work that went into the item that he buys?

This includes a number of stops along the production chain. For one shirt that would be: cultivation and shipping of cotton, manufacture, dying and shipping of textile, design and manufacture of shirt, shipping of shirt, storing and selling of shirt, and the taxi Joe takes to and from the store.

So for the purchase of one shirt, probably something like 8 people (and likely many more) would be involved in getting that shirt from cotton seed to Joe’s closet. But Joe’s shirt would be only a tiny fraction of their yearly work. If you talley up all those fractions, for each of Joe’s shirts, and all his pants, shoes, and all the food he eats and TVs he buys and trips in the car he makes and furniture he purchases etc etc…

So, add all that up, and what would be the total hours of human work that went into sustaining Joe’s life? What is the equivalent number of people working full-time to sustain Joe’s lifestyle?

I bet it’s much higher than you’d expect, and here’s the question I ask: is Joe’s contribution to the world valuable enough that he should be able to (effectively) employ a full-time staff of X people?

Has anyone seen any numbers like this? I’m curious to see what they look like.

I sent Rogers customer service the following email:

Re:
http://www.rogers.com/web/content/wireless-products/iphone_voice_data_packages

you must be joking? those rates are terrible. why does canada have the
worst data plans in the world?

you”ve just killed the iphone in canada, congrats.

And they responded with:

Dear Hugh McGuire,

Thank you for taking the time to write to us, we appreciate your use of
online customer service.

In your recent email, you have informed us that our newly released
iPhone 3G plans are a disappointment.

We are sorry to hear that our iPhone 3G voice and data packages value
are less than you were expecting. We would like to point out that they
do offer more data and airtime than our traditional packages and they
also come with the added features of bonus text messages and visual
voicemail. However, we appreciate that this release has come with
expectations from our customers.

Each carrier has a different pricing strategy. Rogers has designed a
pricing structure that offers high-value, flexible voice and data
packages so that Canadians can make the most of their iPhone 3G
experience.

To fully appreciate everything this device has to offer (phone, iPod and
Internet in one 3G device), our price plans include both voice and data.
We have a wide selection of high value, flexible plans to meet your
needs.

? The majority of carriers offering iPhone 3G worldwide do not have
unlimited plans for this device. Some carriers have implemented a ?soft
cap? so the plan isn?t truly ?unlimited?. For example, in France the
soft cap is 500MB where we have a plan that includes 4 times that amount
in your bucket. Unlimited plans could end up costing you more for what
you don?t use.

? Based on reports that the average usage for the first generation
iPhone was less than 100MB per month, our iPhone 3G plans more than
accommodate the vast majority of customers. Rogers?s customers get 4
times the data on our $60 entry level plan (400 MB) and 20 times the
data on our most comprehensive plan.

At Rogers we are always aiming to improve service to better meet the
needs of our customers and we appreciate your feedback. Your comments
will be passed along for further review and consideration.

We truly hope that you continue to stay loyal to Rogers Wireless however
should you feel that you need to make that move elsewhere. We kindly ask
that the account holder contact our customer care centre by phone at
your convenience. You may contact our Wireless Customer Relations
department toll free from a landline at 1-888-764-3771 or by dialing
*611 from your wireless phone. Our Hours of Operations are Monday to
Friday from 8AM to 9PM and on Saturday from 8AM to 6PM, EST.

Thank you for contacting Rogers. We appreciate your comments. We are
pleased to have been able to address your inquiry. For additional
information please visit our website at www.rogers.com.

For future email correspondence with respect to this e-mail, please
quote reference number 38955822

Regards,
Patty T.
Rogers Online Customer Service
http://www.rogers.com

You know one of the problems about this whole copyright debate is the massive conflict of interest in reporting it in our media companies, which also happen to be our ISPs. Canada’s top 6 ISPs, in order of customer base, are: Bell Sympatico, Shaw, Telus, Rogers, Vidéotron, Cogeco. Looking at what these companies do other than provide your Internet:

• Sympatico is owned by BCE, which also owns a big stake in CTV Globe Media, representing: Canada’s biggest private TV network (CTV), Canada’s biggest national newspaper (Globe and Mail), and 35 radio stations across the country.
• Shaw - mostly a tech company.
• Telus - mostly a tech company.
• Rogers owns magazines (including Maclean’s and Canadian Business), TV stations including CityTV and RogersTV.
• Videotron is owned by Quebecor, which owns scores of newspapers across the country (including Journal de Montreal and the Toronto Sun) numerous magazines in Quebec, the TVA television network, Archambault record stores, Videotron video rental stores, and a number of book publishers.
• Cogeco - mostly a tech company.

So between them, UPDATE: the owners of Bell Sympatico, Rogers and Videotron, probably own three quarters of Canada’s non-CBC news media; the balance owned by CanwestGlobal (which owns Global Television, the National Post, and, of course, Dose Magazine).

All in all not very healthy. The Canadian mania for, and regulatory approval of, consolidation not just in the media business, but in merging media and technology, means that our ISPs are our news providers. So any discussion of Net Neutrality and Copyright will be filtered through the lens of Big Content Providers.

Which, I guess, just means that we have to keep getting the word out.

Jeff Jarvis asks 10 questions of newspapers… Probably these should be asked of anyone who has anything to do with:
a) information
b) the webbernet

Here are the questions, and some teasers… see more here.

1. Who are we?
“I’m going to start with an existential question. It’s a fairly ridiculous one but I don’t think any newspaper has really decided what they are,”…

2. A new relationship?
Jarvis said news organisations need to decide on the appropriate relationship with their audience…

3. Are we generous?
Generosity could take many forms, according to Jarvis - sharing technology, supporting people with the Guardian ad network, allowing people to be stars in the outside world…

4. Do we know who’s smart?
“I’ve changed my mind - I used to be Mr Everything Should Be Open but I have read CiF comments too,” Jarvis said, adding that he was not picking on CiF in particular. “We need to figure out who the smart people are - it’s not just about creating content but also curating people.” …

5. Are we findable?
The idea that people will come to us is changing, and news websites “can’t be findable enough”, according to Jarvis…

6. Are we a platform?
The Guardian had already moved towards becoming a platform with the launch of Comment is Free and the fact that commenters have their own profile, Jarvis said…

7. Are we inventing new narratives?
Jarvis said reporters should go out with audio equipment all the time just to capture what might happen….

8. Are we in data layers?
“Data can tell you things if you find a way to listen,” Jarvis said…

9. Are we having fun yet?
Jarvis said it was essential to experiment and “play” with new ideas in order stay ahead of the competitors…

10. Are we agile?
“The Guardian is the best in the world but others are catching up,” Jarvis warned….

NYTimes reports:

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.’s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.

As I recently read, expressed with great eloquence, elsewhere, Dubya-tee-EFF?

[via talkingpointmemo]

The published online version of Bill C-61 is difficult to manipulate. I’ve copied and posted here the English portion of the most worrying part of the Bill, Section 41, which deals with “circumvention” and “technological measures” aka digital locks.

Jim Prentice, Minister of Industry
Josée Verner, Minister of Canadian Heritage
House of Commons
Parliament Buildings
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada K1A 0A6

Dear Ministers Prentice and Verner,

Thank you for your email of June 12, 2008 informing me of the introduction of Bill C-61, An Act to Amend the Copyright Act.

I am the founder of LibriVox, an all-volunteer, web-based project to make audio recordings of public domain texts and give them away for free. Since our inception in 2005, we’ve run on a yearly budget of $0; yet we’ve become one of the most prolific makers of audio books in the world, with a production rate recently topping 100 books per month. We’ve got a catalog of some 1,500 audio books, including authors such as Dickens, Cervantes, Austen, Dante, Darwin, Sun Tzu, Hobbes, Einstein, and Plato. We also have a number of Canadian classics from Leacock, Lucy Maude Montgomery, and others. We have thousands of volunteers around the world, who make audio versions of texts and give them away because they believe access to knowledge and great literature is one of the most precious gifts we can give to each other. We’ve gained some fame over the years, with articles in the NY Times, radio spots on the BBC, as well as many more mainstream and web media mentions and profiles. The Vice President of Creative Commons recently called us “perhaps the most interesting collaborative culture project this side of Wikipedia.”

LibriVox is the sort of project that is on the outer edge of copyright case law, because what we do was not possible even a few years ago. At our core, we are about reading old books, but we use digital recording software, distributed production models, mass online collaboration, bit torrents, blogging and podcasting, online forums and wikis, bandwidth, mp3s and zip files, all to make recordings of old texts and give them away online for free.

I have some personal objections to Bill C-61 as it has been tabled, objections you’ve heard no doubt from thousands of concerned and angry Canadian citizens. But I wanted to outline two concrete examples of how Bill C-61 would criminalize legitimate activities of Canadian LibriVox volunteers.

EXAMPLE 1: A publisher puts a digital lock on an e-book of a text that is out of copyright, but difficult find in print.

A LibriVox volunteer has purchased the e-book and wishes to copy the public domain text and share it with fellow LibriVox volunteers so that they may make an audio version. Under Bill C-61 it is unlawful for the (Canadian) volunteer to circumvent the digital lock on the e-book, even though the text itself is in the public domain.

This scenario is not far-fetched, it is already happening: in one instance, an e-book version of the American Constitution (certainly in the public domain) was distributed with digital locks and (spurious) copyright terms restricting uses of the text. Of course those copyright terms did not legally apply to the text, but with C-61, it would not matter, because it would be illegal for Canadians to circumvent the digital locks to use the text in ways that they are legally entitled to use it.

Bill C-61’s anti-circumvention provisions mean that publishers get to decide, unilaterally, what is and is not in the public domain. In fact, Bill C-61 would encourage publishers to put digital locks on public domain works (as they already put false copyright claims on print versions), and effectively destroy the principle of limited copyright term, one of the basic tenets of copyright law.

EXAMPLE 2: LibriVox releases all its recordings into the public domain, which means that anyone may use them for any purpose, including commercial uses. A business may — legitimately and legally — decide to bundle and sell LibriVox recordings on CDs, with digital locks.

However, even though LirbiVox, the original publishers, put the recordings in the public domain so they are free to be copied, sold, or given away, the new publisher is able to restrict use on the republished recordings, by putting digital locks on them.

Under Bill C-61, even I, the founder of LibriVox, will be breaking the law by circumventing the digital locks put on LirbiVox recordings, sold by another publisher.

Bill C-61 will allow publishers to take works with liberal copyright terms, and restrict further uses of those works by adding digital locks. It will be illegal for Canadians to break those digital locks, even for uses allowed under the original license of the works.

***

These are two small examples from the LibriVox project, but they are indicative of Bill C-61’s problematic approach of criminalizing legitimate activities by making circumvention illegal.

Making digital locks sacrosanct and better protected than the rights of Canadian citizens makes no sense. As Bob Young has said, Bill C-61’s anti-circumvention provisions are “similar to making the use and ownership of screw-drivers and pliers illegal because they can be used to commit crimes such as burglary.”

The future of knowledge is digital. Bill C-61 is not just about mp3s of the latest rock n’ roll songs, or DVDs of television shows. Bill C-61 is about how Canadians can access, share, consume and use knowledge of all kinds.

If we are to have new copyright legislation in Canada, let’s be sure that we understand what we are doing, and why we are doing it. Let’s be sure that the new copyright legislation at least makes an attempt to understand the changes happening around us.

Librarians, educators, entrepreneurs, software developers, musicians, documentary film makers, and others, as well as thousands of Canadian citizens have voiced their opposition to Bill C-61. You can add to this list public domain audio book makers.

Locksmiths do not get to decide what property rights citizens have under Canadian law. Digital lock makers should not get to define our right to knowledge either.

Bill C-61 must be changed.

Sincerely,

Hugh McGuire
Founder, LibriVox.org

cc.
Hon. Thomas Mulcair, MP, Outremont
Hon. Stephane Dion, Leader of the Opposition
Hon. Charles Angus, MP Timmins-James Bay
Hon. Jack Layton, Leader, New Democratic Party
Hon. Gilles Duceppe, Leader, Bloc Quebecois
Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada

DadaDodo works rather differently than Dissociated Press; whereas Dissociated Press (which, incidentally, refers to itself as a “travesty generator”) simply grabs segments of the body of text and shuffles them, DadaDodo tries to work on a larger scale: it scans bodies of text, and builds a probability tree expressing how frequently word B tends to occur after word A, and various other statistics; then it generates sentences based on those probabilities.

The theory here is that, with a large enough corpus, the generated sentences will tend to be grammatically correct, but semantically random: exterminate all rational thought.

[link]

There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time….Steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.

Lord Chesterfield, quoted by Christine Rosen.

I occasionally ask, has Miette read you a bedtime story yet? You should let her; The New Yorker has, and they liked it, even if they mixed up one Irish lass for another (who, I wonder?).

Speaking of which, whenever I come across Eveline [txt], I always think about Kurt Vonnegut’s wonderful essay about writing, in which he writes:

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of our language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences that were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favourite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader more than those words do.

http://www.miettecast.com/podpress_trac/web/208/0/Miette_Joyce_Eveline.mp3

Youtube has just launched the Screening Room, “connecting films and audiences in the world’s largest theater.” They launched with the truly fabulous NFB short animation, The Danish Poet (what’s not to like about Norway, poets, true love and falling cows?).

I’ve been waiting for more of this kind of thing for a few years now, and very happy that NFB is part of it. I just hope they make more and more available to us.

Canada’s copyright Minister Jim Prentice will be on CBC’s Search Engine this morn, at 11. If you miss it, you’ll be able to listen by podcast (I’ll post a link).

UPDATE: here is the mp3. Have not listened yet.
.

Here is the best primer on the issues I’ve seen yet, from Brendon Wilson.

Also: There is another meeting tonight at Station-C tonight about this:

Date: Thursday, June 19, 2008
Time: 6:00pm - 8:00pm
Location: Station C
Street: 5369 Blvd Saint Laurent
City/Town: Montreal, QC

Once again I can’t make it - Thursdays don’t work for me.

The Smithsonian is putting a collection of public domain photos on Flickr, part of the Flickr Commons project.

Here’s an example, with this curious description:

After parcel post service was introduced [in the US] in 1913, at least two children were sent by the service. With stamps attached to their clothing, the children rode with railway and city carriers to their destination. The Postmaster General quickly issued a regulation forbidding the sending of children in the mail after hearing of those examples.

Thursday, June 12, 2008
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Station C
5369 Blvd St. Laurent #430
Montréal, Québec H2T1S5

Montreal’s technology and creative communities are mobilizing against a new federal bill to restrict creators’ and consumers’ rights to use digital media.

On June 12th, 2008, Industry Minister Jim Prentice will introduce the amendment to the Canadian copyright act, commonly called “the Canadian DMCA”. The bill was crafted under pressure from American media cartels, and it’s expected to have a chilling effect on free expression and free speech in this country. It will restrict Canadians from freely using their computers and other devices to save, store, and play their legally-purchased media.

The Montreal Chapter of Fair Copyright for Canada is holding an emergency action meeting to respond to the new bill. We’ll have information for citizens to learn more about the Canadian DMCA, and materials for writing and sending letters to MPs asking them to oppose the bill. Talks by Fair Copyright for Canada leaders, including a phone call from Michael Geist.

Come meet others in the Montreal area who want a balanced, fair copyright system that works for all Canadians.

-Evan

P.S. Please pass this invitation along to people you might think are interested! The bill was announced yesterday, introduced today, so we’re on very short time frame to have a strong community response. Let’s get the word out!

See: Upcoming.

Unfortunately, I can’t make it!

UPDATE:
This just came into my emailbox:

The Government of Canada has introduced Bill C-61, An Act to Amend the Copyright Act. The proposed legislation is a made-in-Canada approach that balances the needs of Canadian consumers and copyright owners, promoting culture, innovation and competition in the digital age.
What does Bill C-61 mean to Canadians?

Specifically, it includes measures that would:

• expressly allow you to record TV shows for later viewing; copy legally purchased music onto other devices, such as MP3 players or cell phones; make back-up copies of legally purchased books, newspapers, videocassettes and photographs onto devices you own; and limit the “statutory damages” a court could award for all private use copyright infringements;
• implement new rights and protections for copyright holders, tailored to the Internet, to encourage participation in the online economy, as well as stronger legal remedies to address Internet piracy;
• clarify the roles and responsibilities of Internet Service Providers related to the copyright content flowing over their network facilities; and
• provide photographers with the same rights as other creators.

What Bill C-61 does not do:

• it would not empower border agents to seize your iPod or laptop at border crossings, contrary to recent public speculation

What this Bill is not:

• it is not a mirror image of U.S. copyright laws. Our Bill is made-in-Canada with different exceptions for educators, consumers and others and brings us into line with more than 60 countries including Japan, France, Germany and Australia

Bill C-61 was introduced in the Commons on June 12, 2008 by Industry Minister Jim Prentice and Heritage Minister Josée Verner.
For more information, please visit the Copyright Reform Process website at www.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/crp-prda.nsf/en/home

Thank you for sharing your views on this important matter.

The Honourable Jim Prentice, P.C., Q.C., M.P.
Minister of Industry

The Honourable Josée Verner, P.C., M.P.
Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women
and Official Languages and Minister for
La Francophonie

Wordle.net is fun. Here is this post wordled: