Why Copyright?

Point form notes from Michael Geist's talk this morning in Ottawa.

Why has copyright become a 'cool' issue? Reasons:

Advocacy
- people organizing themselves online
- facebook groups
- twitter campaigns, etc
- examples

Government 2.0
- 2001 copyright consutation - 600 responses was huge
- today - British - "Ask the PM"
- other forms of interacting with public
- government blogs, government Facebook accounts

Our Digital Future
- Iron Sky - amateur production - alternativ funding
- Flickr and other content uploading - Facebook
- Culture - eg. Tetes a Claque
- CBC using BitTorrent

Our Knowledge
- Crowdsourceing - Wikipedia, wikitravel, etc.
- Wikitravel press - 400 page guide - POD - new, fresh
- Encyclopedia of Life, Project Gutenberg, Librivox
- Open access,
- the Canadian journal Open Medicine - editorial independence
- Open Journal System

Our Education
- open education - OpenCourseWare
- Moodle, open source software, BitTorrent
- Open books - more people buy the book if it's freely available

Our innovation
- the justification for copyright always seems to be innocation
- but we see company after company flourishing in Canada under current copyright

Our Consumer rights
- what we can do with CDs - listening to it with the device of our choice
- region coding - wanting to view media purchased elsewhere
- ebooks and ebook locks
- cell phones - it would be an infringement to unlock your cellphone to swicth carriers c-61
- is about copyright choices
- we could have chosen to move toward flexible fair dealing
- eg. by adding the phrase "such as" to the list of allowable circumstamnces
- eg. television recording "time shifting" - vs broadcast flag
- anti-circumvention provisions prevent fair use/dealing
- c-61 was, for all intents and purposes, a copy of DMCA - but worse