New Canadian Copyright Law Expected Any Day Now

A heads up for the next few weeks…
The Canadian Copyright reform is likely to be tabled by industry minister Jim Prentice by the time Parliament breaks for the summer in early June.

There’s certainly no lack of coverage on this issue, and it’s to be expected that Michael Geist is front and centre on the issue,
(Michael, if you’re somehow trackback’ing this, thanks for all your work in this matter!)

Here’s one link (among many):

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2947/196/

Keep a vigilant eye on legislation being pushed through the house in the next week or so. It’s up to us to make sure we aren’t blindsided with malicious legislation that bows to the demands of American creative industries and duplicates their DMCA north of the border.

Stay tuned and keep watch.
I’ll be sure to have commentary on what transpires.

Who needs copyright anyway?

Hey all,
It’s been a long while since my last post, apologies that my blogging has gotten lost in the shuffle.
Thesis writing has begun to take shape, and over the next weeks some more substantial updates with regards to my writing will be appearing here. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, to continue the theme of some past posts here’s another ditty concerning copyright and its place in the digital age:

John Degen of the Globe and Mail writes “Who needs copyright anyway?”

A little sample…

Canada is locked in an epic and bloody war over copyright, or so we’re led to believe. Corporations, consumers and artists fight over new technologies and the content they deliver. I used to believe in this war myself, even fancied myself a bit of a warrior. But recently, the noise of battle has begun to sound more and more inconsequential, like an argument over directions between two people without a map. In fact, there is no great copyright crisis in our culture. The panic is false.

Music Sharing Doesn’t Necessarily Equal Infringement

A key legal development, (From WIRED Online)

http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/04/judge-says-musi.html

Here’s the crux of the news:

Just because the RIAA’s investigative partner MediaSentry was able to download 12 copyrighted songs from the Howell’s Kazaa account at two in the morning on January 30, 2006 doesn’t necessarily mean that other people were downloading the songs too. In fact, the judge held, there is no proof that the couple distributed copyrighted songs to anyone except the MediaSentry investigator.

This is going to be a very significant legal precedent for future cases of P2P. Keep a watchful eye. This is only the beginning of a huge tectonic shift in the legality of online distribution.

EDIT:
Other Links:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/30/riaa_making_available_defeat_eff_howell_arizona/

http://www.p2pnet.net/story/15780

A successful IASPM!

A monday morning post following the weekend of the IASPM conference.

The conference was a tremendous experience! Met a lot of great people, and sat in on some very interesting panels. Shame that there were generally five concurrent panels, so for every one you got to see, there were four you missed… but the ones I did see consisted of some compelling work.
Furthermore, it was a great networking experience, and I got a lot of positive response from my presentation as well as started some key research dialogs with some new colleagues that will continue in the next weeks…

In a prior post, I included my draft, and in this post, I’ll include the final paper.

2008-iaspm-us-paper – Potentials for Pandora

CC 3.0.

I received some constructive feedback at the conference, and have also begin to think about integrating ideas that were brought to light in other panels.
Long term, I’m looking to revise this and possibly look towards journal publication, so further comments are always welcome,

Adrian

Blogging from Iowa

Well, IASPM 2008 gets going tomorrow!
I’m at the venue and just thought to post a quick blurb.
My panel is tomorrow afternoon, and while I’m not familiar with either of my copresenters, I’m intrigued by their presentations’ titles,

Should be fun…
Await a post tomorrow night for an update!

All for now

“Is content worthless?” – pt. 2!

I didn’t intend to make this a back-to-back posts series, but sometimes stuff comes up and two points of interest just end up resonating along the same lines. That being said, I am proud to announce that the “Is Content worthless” thread of April 11th gets a reprise and a sequel!

The last post approached the question “Is content worthless?” from an economic perspective, approaching worth more along the lines of cost / price. It was the latest of many digital-age takes on frictionless economics and the emerging value of experience over commodity. Well worth the read.

But this time around, “worth” takes on a more philosophical tone and we approach the issue of content creation from a stance of “human” worth….

The piece I came across is as follows (from “Trends in the Living Networks“):
http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2008/04/automated_conte.html

this writing, in turn, draws from an article in yesterday’s New York Times (2008/04/14)

If the topic hasn’t yet peaked your interest enough to warrant a clickthrough, then here’s a blurb to wet your whistle…

Automated content creation: pushing the boundaries of human value
Ross Dawson, April 13, 2008 7:48 PM US PT

The history of human society has largely been about replacing human work with tools and machines. From the plough to the spinning jenny to the computer, people have stopped doing tasks because machines can do them better. In most cases we are getting rid of things that we don’t particularly enjoy doing anyway, and it’s hard to take pride in doing work that can be done by a machine. In a way, humanity can be defined by what it is that humans can do that machines can’t do. That boundary is continually being pushed further…

(also watch the video clip as it probably explains the concept quite vividly)
As always, Comments invited!

(p.s. in case anyone is wondering, yes, academic work persists… stay tuned for a post coming up real soon with the revised draft of the IASPM paper)

“Is Content Worthless?”

From the Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-handel/is-content-worthless_b_96195.html

Jonathan Handel poses the question: Is Content Worthless??

He traces six very well laid out issues that impact on the new value of content on the web.
Where he and I don’t see eye to eye is that his view seems to label the trends as a series of problematics, curses to be overcome in some way. The devaluing of content and the rise of cheaply made, cheaply distributed user-generated culture is a good thing, not a bad thing, though many might disagree…
The days of elite professional media are on the way out, and some people lament the loss of this professionalism of media creation. But the bottom line is, the modes of production, starting with text publication and now expanding to include music and video, are becoming democratized and accessible at a cheaper cost to the former “consumer”, now in the role of a producer/consumer, or prosumer if you will…

Quoting Handel’s piece, he quips near the conclusion of the article that:

“when everyone’s a creator, there’s less room for high-quality professional content.”

I won’t get into why I see the knee-jerk correlation of “professional” to “high-quality” (and conversely implying that non-professional equals low-quality) as obviously elitist, but the bottom line is QUALITY is about VALUE, and if people enjoy youTube videos more than Mozart, who is to tell them what constitutes quality and what doesn’t???

Welcome to Postmodernity…
The objective pursuit of “Culture”, capital “C” has been abandoned and we’ve entered a new age in which culture is simply “that which is…”, with youTube, Apple Garageband, facebook, flickr, and mySpace haralding as the pinnacles of this new mediated cultural landscape.

And quite frankly, I don’t see that as amounting to the dire prospect that some have claimed it to be…

Another great online documentary…

“The Truth about Wikipedia”
A documentary by Dutch documentary filmmaker IJsbrand van Veele, aired at the “Next Web” conference earlier this month.

My review:
A balanced and compelling take on the web 2.0 phenomenon with voices from both sides contributing to the argument about democratized content and the contribution to collective knowledge in a networked world. If you haven’t thought long and hard about such topics, after seeing this documentary, I guarantee you will…

IASPM Paper – Draft

It’s been a few days since my last post, but meanwhile I’ve started to get well into drafting my paper for the IASPM conference to be held at the end of the month…

iaspm-draft04

Please contribute your comments, critiques, suggestions!
(NOTE: If you would like a clearer sense of the scope of the paper, I posted the abstract and submission in an earlier post)

Any thoughts?

Over the past few days, a selection of rulings have been made by the courts (in the U.S. mind you)  regarding the legalities surrounding what legalspeak refers to as the “making available” argument of copyright infringement.

WIRED magazine has the story.

Turns out the most recent ruling (out of Boston) is that availability alone does not constitute a crime, thus leaving the onus on the RIAA to prove download occurred from the user accused of “distribution”.

What are people’s thoughts on this contested topic?