shadowspar

I really wish all the story headlines, tweets, etc, floating around about how the administration at UofT and Western knuckled under to Access Copyright could be rewritten from

Canadian Universities Submit to Completely Dumbass Copyright Agreement

to

Two Canadian Universities Submit to Completely Dumbass Copyright Agreement

We are not all cowardly dumbasses, and in fact, I would venture to say that the majority of us are quite wroth with the doubtless small number of administrators who approved this deal at a small number of admittedly major Canadian universities.

The committee considering C-32, the copyright reform bill before the Canadian House of Commons, invited public feedback on the bill. Here's what I sent them.

Dear Honorable Members of the C-32 Legislative Committee,

If a hotelier could alter the laws which governed conduct at their inn simply by posting a notice on the door, what might they write? Failing to make your bed might be punishable by a fine or imprisonment; perhaps use of the hotel glassware to consume beverages not purchased there would be similarly forbidden. Surely, this scenario is beyond absurd, but it is effectively what the technological protection measures provisions of Bill C-32 let copyright owners do: to themselves write the copyright law that applies to their materials instead of having it determined by Parliament.

As someone who writes prose, creates software, and performs music, I understand and sympathize with concerns about copyright infringement and its potential effect on creators' income. I would welcome a legislative framework that addresses people who are trying to make a profit from large-scale unauthorized copying, but it's equally important for content users -- that is to say, every Canadian -- to be able to freely, fairly, and fully use the materials they've legitimately acquired.

To best serve society, copyright needs to strike a balance between the rights of users and those of creators. Vesting creator-authored restrictions with the force of law upsets that balance in the most catastrophic way possible.

I wanted to post a big ranty screed about this, but this post on DVDs and this one on DRM-ed audiobooks just about sum it up.

The big media companies make much of the fact that the pirate sites are giving away music and movies for free. They tend not to mention the fact that the usability of their own offerings is freakin' horrible -- these companies actively try to prevent customers from making legitimate use of the material they just shilled out their hard-earned money for.

We'll take music as an example. Let's look at a few of the many things that file-sharing networks allow you to do and the media companies' offerings don't.

• You can preview any part of any song you want.
• You can listen to music from any artist in the entire world, without geographic restriction. If you're interested in a Japanese band, you can access and download their music from anywhere; it doesn't matter whether you're in Tokyo, Toronto, or Tajikistan.
• The downloaded files will work with any software, operating system, or media player you want to use them with.
• You can listen to the music on every computer and media player that you own; there are no restrictions on how many devices you can copy it to.
• Oh yeah, you don't get treated to commercials or warnings about how people who copy music are reprehensible wretched commie thieves.

Even if downloading tracks from bittorrent were to cost the same as iTunes, bittorrent would still be the better offering. In short, the pirates are offering a better music service than the music industry, even though they're not making any real money from it.