Russell McOrmond

Thoughts on Liberal Party of Canada during their 2012 convention

2012-01-14T11:15:00.001-05:00

Federal political news this weekend is focused on the Liberal party convention, as expected. They are speaking of renewal, having been pushed to 3'rd party in the house during the last election.

Since I was voting age I've been a member of the Progressive Conservative party of Canada and Green Party of Canada, donated money to individual NDP MPs and campaigns, and voted Liberal. There are things I agree and disagree with each of the parties with seats in the house, and there are individual MPs I respect and some I don't that are not dependant on party lines.

I believe that the Liberal party, as it was in the past, will no longer work. If their intention is to regain what they once had, they have no future.

They focused on trying to build their Big Red Tent, inviting everyone inside. There was nothing other than their tribal colours that could be said about this group. They had people that crossed nearly all political philosophies. This meant you had to focus on the individual MPs to see if you could stand that individual, knowing that this likely back-bench MP wouldn't have sway if the leadership of the party headed in another direction. You really had no idea what you were voting for, or if your vote would end up contradicting your own political beliefs.

The party became very arrogant, and there are still people from that mindset steering the party. Likely the most arrogant MP I ever met in person (see list if curious) was Sheila Copps. I met her in person in the context of the Minister's Forum on Copyright, April 4th, 2003, when she was Heritage Minister. She had very superficial ideas on the impact of copyright on creators, creativity and innovation. She would walk away and/or argue with anyone who had any depth to their thinking. I observed her speaking on other policy in other forums, and she seemed to carry this unjustified arrogance with her there as well.

I feel that Sheila Copps is a representative of what went wrong with the Liberal Party of Canada. This weekend the party will be electing a president, and Sheila Copps is one of the top contenders. I believe it will be telling of whether they will be a backward facing party without a future, or a forward facing one recognising the need to change, by who they elect as president.

Ms. Copps is not the only Liberal that I felt ignored the "evidence based policy" thinking that appears to be the theme of this convention. When Copps was pushed out by the Martin Liberals (riding boundary readjustments they said.....), Sam Bulte (Parkdale - High Park) took her place, and when she lost her seat (partly due to controversy with her opposing evidence based policy), Dan McTeague (Pickering - Scarborough East) took over. While they all had ideological positions that lacked evidence on the areas of policy I was most closely watching, it was not an ideological position that was party based or that was consistent with other MPs or representatives of the party. Given some of the least evidence based thinking MPs were Liberals, it made it hard for anyone following these issues to vote Liberal.

Is the focus on "evidence based policy" thinking a recognition that this was lacking in the Liberals in the past, or is this an attempt at a partisan attack another political party? Does the Liberal party recognise its faulty past and are looking to make large changes to become more relevant in the future, or are they looking to regain their past? I'll be watching....

Protecting IT property rights not a short-term calling

2011-11-19T08:11:00.001-05:00

I've been asked over the last decade how my activism will change once Canadian legislation that includes Paracopyright passes. Will my activism be finished, and will I admit "defeat" if a bill abrogates the government's responsibility to protect IT property rights?

At one level this could be a question about whether I will honour the law, which isn't really a fair question. Conservative MP Lee Richardson (Calgary Centre) suggests my honouring the law is optional, saying "If a digital lock is broken for personal use, it is not realistic that the creator would choose to file a law suit against the consumer, due to legal fees and time involved." I suspect the fact one of my early submissions to the government in 2001 involved documenting my circumvention of a TPM for an otherwise lawful purpose suggests that I will continue to do the same.

The more important answer is to state that our activism can not discontinue, and any passage of legislation is only one stage in an ongoing process. The United States provides examples where possible legislative wins can turn around in the courts, which suggests we will need to remain active to seek to turn any legislative losses into wins in the courts or later legislative wins.

A twitter/Google+ exchange with Jason J Kee, Director of Policy and Legal Affairs at the Entertainment Software Alliance of Canada, provides an example of this issue. Mr Kee's association includes game console manufacturers as members, with some game console manufacturers and mobile computer manufacturers being the least respective of IT property rights. Given some of his members want to legalise and legally protect activities which infringe upon the rights of technology owners, our biases in how to look at these policies will be quite different.

He challenged a suggestion I made in a Google+ posting that the USA's technological measures provisions have a tie to infringing purposes. I pointed to my reading of the DMCA which includes the following after defining access control technical measures in Title 17, § 1201, includes the following:

(c) Other Rights, Etc., Not Affected. — (1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.

(2) Nothing in this section shall enlarge or diminish vicarious or contributory liability for copyright infringement in connection with any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof.

(3) Nothing in this section shall require that the design of, or design and selection of parts and components for, a consumer electronics, telecommunications, or computing product provide for a response to any particular technological measure, so long as such part or component, or the product in which such part or component is integrated, does not otherwise fall within the prohibitions of subsection (a)(2) or (b)(1).

(4) Nothing in this section shall enlarge or diminish any rights of free speech or the press for activities using consumer electronics, telecommunications, or computing products.

This is a pretty plain language suggestion that the legislators intended limits and exceptions to copyright to not be trumped by technological measures.

Mr. Kee suggested that I'm "ignoring 10+ years of jurisprudence under the DMCA which does not support your assertion #C11", "Most recent MDY v Blizzard, where 9th Cir confirmed no nexus b/t circumvention & infringement 1.usa.gov/dN3wbX #C11"

What he pointed to was "MDY INDUSTRIES v. BLIZZARD ENTERTAINMENT" appeal decision from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

In this case the court ruled that "for a licensee's violation of a contract to constitute copyright infringement, there must be a nexus between the condition and the licensor's exclusive rights of copyright." They then ignored the section of the DMCA I quoted above, and suggested that there should be no nexus between an access control and any rights or limitations in copyright. They went out of their way to ignore or reinterpret other court decisions and statements made by legislators to come to a specific decision.

We could discuss how courts are political entities, and how this Democrat dominated court is interpreting protectionist policies originating in the Clinton/Gore National Information Infrastructure Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights.

The take-away for Canadians should be that after Bill C-11 is passed, the law will continue to change. We should not resign ourselves into believing Canada will follow the USA in increasing the enabling of IT property rights infringement. It is just as likely that things will go the other way.

The MDY INDUSTRIES v. BLIZZARD ENTERTAINMENT case is in my mind a clear example of a TPM being abused to enforce contractual obligations, where one party to the contract is given excessive control over the other. In Canada there have been a number of law professors who have called attention to this issue, going as far as to suggest that this "poorly veiled attempt by the Government to strengthen the contractual rights available to copyright owners, in the guise of copyright reform" may be unconstitutional. Contract law is provincial jurisdiction, and any Paracopyright provisions that extend beyond activities that are the subject matter of copyright may be struck down by Canadian courts.

In my mind, any abuse of a technology that disables law abiding computer owners to control their computers for lawful purposes is an infringement of IT property rights. It is possible that provincial governments and courts will be called upon to clarify this aspect of tangible property rights, and weigh in favour of technology owners. They may not only strike down any legal protection of these abuses of technology in federal Copyright law, but may create legislation to legally prohibit it. This may allow owners to be able to go after infringers, providing the level of protection to technology owners that Bill C-11 alleges to provide for copyright owners.

Ensuring that these infringers won't get away with their dishonest activities when it comes to our governments, our courts, and our computers will require that we remain active in fighting to protect our rights. Setbacks at one time do not mean we should give up, and laws and interpretation of those laws change all the time.

Are paywalls a Copyright issue?

2011-10-31T11:12:00.000-04:00

We should answer the question of whether a paywall is a copyright issue, before we dive into the question of the importance of this question for the debate around the Paracopyright provisions in Bill C-11.

I am familiar with paywalls from the perspective of both a user and a provider of such services. I will offer two specific examples of paywalls to illustrate the issues.

I have been a paid subscriber to The Hill Times since 2005. This is an example of a service that offers some access to anonymous browsers on the Internet, but offers advanced services (full access to search through considerable archives, access to all new articles, etc) only to paid subscribers. You use a simple username and password to log in to prove you are a subscribe.

My current job is as a software author and system administrator for Canadiana.org. We offer anonymous access to some content, while other content is only available to paid subscribers. All the content is in the public domain, so copyright isn't relevant to our service. What is being paid for is access to this content as a method to fund the work we do in digitizing and organizing this information. We have individual and institutional subscribers, with individual users able to subscribe quickly making use of a simple PayPal payment system. While institutional subscribers are given access based on their internet address, individual subscribers use a simple username and password to indicate they are a subscriber.

These two services equally use of a paywall to differentiate between anonymous access and subscribers. While The Hill Time is offering access to copyrighted works, Canadian.org is not. From a legal standpoint these paywalls should be treated the same, with each being offered the same level of legal protection against people who might want to gain unauthorized access to our services.

There has been suggestions from some people that paywalls are inadequately legally protected in Canada. This is often being claimed by proponents of the Paracopyright ("digital locks") provisions in Bill C-11. I don't know for certain whether paywalls are offered adequate legal protection under existing Canadian federal or provincial laws, including whether existing criminal code is sufficient.

I will state that the Copyright act is exactly the wrong law to provide this legal protection. It would make very bad law if legal protection for a paywall was dependent on the specifics of what is offered behind the paywall rather than protecting all paywalls equally and fairly. While I agree with the suggestion that paywalls should be offered legal protection, it must be in the correct law.

While it is true that some copyright holders make use of paywalls in support of their businesses, it is also true that even more copyright holders use electricity in support of their businesses. Suggesting that legal protection for paywalls must be in C-11 makes about as much sense as suggesting that a national energy strategy must also be included in Bill C-11.

The question of whether paywalls are a copyright question came up in a twitter conversation where a proponent of Bill C-11 style Paracopyright was trying to be critical of Postmedia for considering paywalls. He was trying to suggest this conflicted with other articles on the Globe and Mail which were critical of the Paracopyright provisions of Bill C-11.

I hope it is obvious that there is no conflict with supporting, subscribing to or even providing paywall services and being strongly opposed to the Paracopyright provisions of Bill C-11. My primary motivation for my involvement in the copyright revision process is as an opponent to abuses of these provisions to infringe owners rights which Paracopyright provisions may enable.

Trying to conflate different issues like this is a common political tactic of those trying to promote these provisions. They take a non-controvercial technology like paywalls, claim that this is all that is meant by "technological measures" or "digital locks" in C-11, and then try to shove under the rug all the opposition to these highly controversial measures.

What most stakeholders are asking for is that any Paracopyright contained within Canadian copyright law should be tied strongly to otherwise copyright infringing acts. This is what the two 1996 WIPO treaties were calling for, given they are tied to "technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of " copyright related rights "that restrict acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law".

The further protection for "technological measures" added to copyright law strays from copyright infringing activities, the easier it is for providers of these technologies (the holders of the keys to these "digital locks") can abuse these provisions to circumvent laws including (but not limited to) contract, e-commerce, property, competition, trade as well as copyright.

One really has to wonder the motivation of those who want legal protection for "technological measures" added to copyright law to have little or no connection to otherwise copyright infringing activities. In some cases it is a lack of understanding of the underlying technology.

In some cases there may be ulterior motives. Some companies may want their circumvention of existing laws protected by beyond-WIPO Paracopyright provisions. There are some popular hardware brands in the game console, cell phone and other mobile computing space which have been outright hostile to the property rights of technology owners. Some of the representatives of these hardware manufacturers, including some representatives of the Entertainment Software Association of Canada, have made some of the most extreme claims.

Spectrum from software/computing freedom to imprisonment

2011-10-08T12:06:00.000-04:00

I had a heated conversation at GOSLING last evening about just how friendly to FLOSS or "good" that Google is compared to Apple.   I have personally disliked Apple and their products since the 1980's when I was first introduced to the Lisa and Mac, with the closest I ever came to Apple was having an Apple II clone in the mid 1980's. This Apple II clone came with schematics in the manual, so a very different type of computer than the locked-down devices that people purchase from Apple today.

This conversation is one where different people will have different opinions. I've seen a lot of Mac's at Linux events over the years, from the same people who scream at Microsoft for their business practises.   I think it would be interesting to others for me to publish my own concept of the spectrum, even knowing there will be (sometimes quite strong) disagreement.

A few select individuals and organisations, ordered from Freedom to imprisonment :

Richard Stallman

If any individual represents what I consider to be the ideal for protecting the rights of technology owners, it is Richard Stallman.   He believes that all software should come with the 4 freedoms. According to Wikipedia, his only computer at the moment is a Lemote Yeeloong netbook which he chose because it can run with 100% free software even at the BIOS level, stating "freedom is my priority. I've campaigned for freedom since 1983, and I am not going to surrender that freedom for the sake of a more convenient computer."

There are other people at and associated with the FSF, the Software Freedom Conservancy or other such organisations which are more willing to surrender freedom for the sake of a more convenient computer. In general these folks have stayed pretty close to their ideals, and for this I congratulate them!

Russell McOrmond

While I understand the importance of freedom, and the fight to protect the rights of technology owners and all the human rights that are impacted by digital technology, I have made a number of sacrifices and compromises. I have purchased a Boxee Box, which I consider a lesser evil than the service I am getting from Rogers Cable -- and the impact of the lobbying of Rogers against our technology interests. I have a Google Nexus 1 and an ASUS transformer, both that run Android which is based on FLOSS (including Copyleft), but where there are proprietary components. I don't have a FLOSS BIOS in any of my computers (that I am aware of), and even have some pretty ugly application choices such as Adobe Flash and Skype on various computers.

Many of these choices relate to access to multimedia content than about the computer themselves. I am not willing (and not being single, able :-) to just cut myself from mainstream culture and not access any content not made legally available to me in vendor-neutral and unlocked formats. I am willing to do this for music and books, where I will only purchase or otherwise access unlocked content. This choice is quite different for movies/television where there really are no options that aren't politically compromised in some way.

I have become a subscriber to Netflix as a lesser of the evils way to move away from BDU's such as Rogers Cable. Netflix is only available on "authorised" devices, so I have been investigating some of the "lest offensive" of the authorised options such as the Boxee Box and various options running a Google OS (Chrome, Android).

I have uncomfortable choices imposed on me by others. I can compromise on software freedom, I can compromise on copyright (access more unlocked content, where it wasn't the copyright holder who made that available to me), or I can disengage from mainstream culture. At least for the moment while I'm actively involved in copyright revision policy, I'm temporarily accepting the first option.

Google

Google has its flaws, and makes some choices I am not comfortable with. There are various justifications/excuses offered for each of these decisions, and while I may not like them I am still a "customer" partly because I seem them as a lesser of the mainstream evils.

Most Android devices have non-owner locks on them, with the same being true of Chromebooks. Google doesn't disallow third-party applications not authorized from them from being installed, and there is a thriving third-party community maintaining things like CyanogenMod.   There are problems where Google delays the public release of non-copyleft components of the Android stack: something they aren't obligated to do, but which have raised the eyebrows of nearly every FLOSS supporter watching Google.

On the political front, Google lobbies hard for more sensible technology law (copyright, patent, etc). They have expressed opposition to technical measures policy in the various countries who have passed it, or are considering passing such as Canada.   They may allow hardware manufacturers to place non-owner locks on devices running their operating system, and even sell anti-interoperability locked content from their marketplace, but they are not expressing support for legally protecting these locks under Copyright law.

Google is a major contributor to many publicly licensed (including copyleft) projects, and even helps fund students direct participation in projects as part of their Google Summer of Code program. This is a global program which I wish were harnessed by our provincial education ministries (additional funding, better coordination with co-op programs, etc).

Microsoft

When we move down the imprisonment scale to Microsoft, we have passed that magic line where I'm willing to be a customer.   While I have various coasters (CDs/DVDs/Floppies) that came with computers I bought that have a Microsoft logo on them, I am not a customer or user of any of their software.   Well, at least not any software that they haven't released as FLOSS and are incorporated in FLOSS projects I happen to use where their contributions don't affect the overall project.

I have been observing Microsoft since the late 1980's, when Windows 2.x was what they offered. They were already on the rise, being seen by many as being a "more open" alternative to Apple's MacOS as far as choices offered to hardware and software developers, as well as end users.

I have to admit that I didn't take Microsoft very seriously until Windows for Workgroups and NT back in 1992. I was an Amiga user about to abandon that platform as I found it to be a little to freedom-restrictive. I already felt Apple was the most restrictive platform that I figured had long-term viability, and I was looking into NetBSD (running on my Amiga 3000) and this new oddball thing called Linux that ran on cheaper hardware that existed in a more competitive hardware marketplace.

While I was wrong to largely dismiss Microsoft as not being serious, I believe I remained correct in seeing them as a far more open alternative when compared to Apple. While Microsoft gained massive market share (I believe largely due to that comparative openness), they have abused that market share in more ways than I think appropriate to discuss here. Because of their monopoly-scale market share size in the legacy desktop marketplace, the costs of their policy blunders are enormous. They, however, were never really blindly trusted and to think of them as being a harmful corporation is a pretty mainstream viewpoint.

As an individual, I have disagreed with the political philosophy of Bill Gates. His ideological blinders around thinking of knowledge as equivalent to tangible physical products has caused harm far beyond the information technology sector to global health.   I see the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation as being a tax-deductible lobbying arm for this ideology, working to block the use of live saving generic drugs or non-tangible-property based methods to fund the expansion of human knowledge.

Apple

The centralised control that Apple wishes to exert goes far beyond wanting to own and/or control the hardware and software marketplace. What they do on the lobbying front is what has kept them as being the worst IT/software company in my mind.

More than any other individual corporate member of the Business Software Alliance or the International Intellectual Property Institute (IIPI), they have been lobbying against the otherwise legally protected rights of technology owners.   This is not to say that the non-software members of the IIPI that have been duped by the BSA members have no responsibility. This is also not a suggestion that other BSA members like Adobe and Microsoft are somehow pawns of Apple, but that as bad as they are I still consider them to be lesser evils.

As an individual, the evil-genius of Steve Jobs somehow made imprisonment sexy and cool. While there were always people on the fringes of their customer base that complained about the legality of things like jailbreaking/etc, Apple under Jobs had a loyal fan-base that fought any suggestion that they were actively engaged in this attack on a variety of otherwise legally protected rights and freedoms. I know many people within and outside the FLOSS movement who will gripe about Microsoft, the BSA, and other such organisations, while typing away on their Mac or iOS devices. They will even argue with you when you point out various anti-rights political activities carried out by Apple, or the fact that Steve Jobs (while at Next) was the first violator of the GNU General Public License.

It wasn't only dismantling the rights of computer owners where the evil-genius of Mr Jobs was applied. What Apple was able to do to the recording industry was amazing, with the transfer of control of the music industry from major recording labels to Apple ongoing. While some individuals in the recording industry recognise this threat to their very existance, not everyone in that sector does. A foe of a political foe is not an ally, but I do have to feel sorry for recording industry executives and lobbiests who continue to fight for policies (such as TPMs in Copyright law) which in reality threaten their very existance.

It is likely that the anti-rights political and economic activism will continue post Steve Jobs.   I do wonder if Richard Stallman's hope will come true, which is that "his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective."

Will you explain why DRM is bad?

2011-10-07T11:02:00.000-04:00

I was asked on twitter to explain why DRM is bad. Given I have spent more than a decade talking about this topic, you would think there is a simple twitter-length answer: but there isn't.

Whether you believe the acronym expands to Digital Rights Management, Digital Restrictions Management, or Dishonest Relationship Misinformation, it doesn't define a specific technology or technique. The acronym is used to refer to non-controversial technologies such as databases describing content and eCommerce websites, to highly controversial things such as digital locks which lock out the owners of what is locked.

We can't entirely avoid using confusing terms, as people will immediately say "Aren't you talking about DRM" when you want to speak about specific harmful activities. It is very useful to be clear whenever the time is available.

When some people are concerned about DRM they are concerned about the inability to loan electronic books, or to exercise their fair dealing rights. While that is peripherally interesting to me, and I agree with some and disagree with other of these ideas, my main concern is impacts which are entirely outside of copyright. I am happy to discuss (including in comments below, or on the Digital-copyright.ca site) copyright related topics, but for the purpose of this article I am going to talk about things which are unrelated to copyright.

The two techniques I have been fighting against are anti-interoperability locks on content, and non-owner locks on devices.

I believe it should be obvious why having a lock, digital or otherwise, which locks the owner out of what they own is wrong. In our society most people have at least a minimum of respect for the concept of property rights, and believe that if locks exist it should be the owner that controls them. Locks should certainly never be allowed to be abused to lock the owner out of what they own, and our laws should protect the owner against such scenarios. I would be happy to discuss this more if people want, but I am honest in saying that I can't understand why people demonstrate such a lack of respect for or understanding why governments property rights in these discussions.

It shouldn't matter if what is locked is our homes, our cars, or our computers: we should never allow for digital exceptionalism where we ignore basic property rights if the property happens to be digital technology.

The anti-interoperability lock on content ties the ability to access the content to specific brands of devices. This is harmful in a variety of ways, including being what I consider to be a textbook example of tied selling as described in section 77 of our competition act. Governments have competition and anti-trust laws for a reason, and again we should not throw away this body of law simply because the tied selling includes something digital.

I don't believe that copyright holders should have the right to decide what brands of technology I use, or what features should exist in the technology that is created and sold. That said, those who support this policy should recognize that in the vast majority of real-world scenarios it is not the copyright holder that controls the keys to these digital locks. It is the vendor of the DRM system, a technology company, that controls the keys. Any digital lock, analog or digital, protects the interests of the key-holder and not necessarily the owner. I have observed many copyright holders switch their position from being in strong support of technological measures being added to copyright law to being strong opponents once they realized that they as copyright holders would not have the keys or any real-world control over these digital locks.

More important to me, these anti-interoperability locks tie people to non-owner locked devices, something I believe should be prohibited in law. My primary issue in this debate is the protection of the tangible property rights of technology owners. Even if it were copyright holders that held the keys to the digital locks on their content, and even if there was a shred of evidence that these locks reduced copyright infringement (most evidence suggests increases), I would still disagree that this justified the legalization of non-owner locks on our devices or anti-competitive behaviour that encouraged the use of non-owner locked devices.

While I believe that these two controversial locks should be prohibited in law, Bill C-11 (and C-32 and C-61 before them) provide legal protection for them. While these bills are called "An Act to amend the Copyright Act", the digital locks provisions are not related to the subject matter of copyright law. In fact, these digital locks have been and will continue to be abused to circumvent the contours of existing laws including contract, e-commerce, property, competition, trade and even copyright.

We have a long way to go in this conversation. In my mind anyone who respects contract, e-commerce, property, competition, trade, and/or copyright should be opposed to "technological measures" being added to the copyright act. Legal protection for "technological measures" must be added to the correct law in order for them not to be abused to circumvent the law.

If a technical measure is protecting contracting terms, including a copyright license agreement, then the legal protection should be in provincial contract law.

If a technical measure is protecting electronic commerce, then the legal protection should be in provincial e-commerce law.

And so on...

Hope this helps, and sorry that there isn't a twitter-sized response to this question. There is a lack of clarity in what the acronym means, which add to the confusion that most of the impacts of adding "technological measures" to copyright law have nothing to do with copyright.

Character assassinations in Ontario election

2011-09-22T11:26:00.000-04:00

Last evening I was invited on an episode of Dyscultured, which had a special theme. Anthony Marco, one of the founding co-hosts of the show, put his name into the race to run in Niagara West-Glanbrook for the NDP in the Ontario election.

The Liberal party, or at least some misguided spokespersons, have decided that taking comments out of context to character assassinate political opponents is an appropriate campaign strategy. You can see the type of embarrassing crap coming out of the Liberal Party of Ontario on Newswire.ca: Liberals Call on NDP to Dump Candidate, The Full Anthony Marco Text - Which Part Does The NDP Believe Is Misrepresented?, and More from NDP's Anthony Marco - Ontarians are "lazy".

The comical aspect of this is that the "Which Part Does The NDP Believe Is Misrepresented" press release contains an exert that makes clear that Anthony did not say what the Liberal party is alleging he said. Unfortunately, there will be many people who won't read even that tiny exert to realize the Liberals are playing dirty pool. This is a sad part of politics: that few spend the time to learn the facts, and shallow immature political rhetoric all too often wins a debate.

Anthony is a complex multi-dimensional person who has been expressing his ideas online for many years. I had been listening to a few of his podcasts for a few years already when he totally blew me away at PAB back in June.

The first thing that came to mind with this smear campaign is how we need to mature politics from what the Liberals are doing in a world where more people are living their lives in public. Words and ideas that may have been quickly forgotten a few hours after people went home from the social event, are archived forever online. Some people like to talk about this as a problem for youth, but for people like Anthony or myself we have been living in a long-term publicly archived space for much of our lives. You can still read some of the silly questions I asked about copyright back in 1992, when I was first joining the Free Software movement. Someone could easily take that question, pretend it was asked recently, and ruin my credibility as someone who has spent much of the last decade dedicated to learning about copyright in order to help with forward-looking policy proposals.

The last thing we want is allow politics to be something that can only be done by stick-figure people with no real history, and who have never spent time thinking about complex issues. Even though Anthony is running for the NDP, I would vote for him if he was in my riding based on him being a real person who has given some real thought to real issues. Many of his podcasts include him thinking out loud about real issues of the day, something that I think should be seen as a requirement of a good politician : not something to avoid.

Reading a few more articles about the issue, it turns out that the smear campaign was largely launched by Liberal candidate Bernie Farber who is running in Thornhill. Mr Farber was previously the CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), which made this smear campaign seem all too familiar.

I have run into the CJC a few times in the past, and always in the context of attempts at censorship. Their general policy seemed to be to use (or abuse) the legal courts and the court of public opinion to try to stop people from talking about anything they didn't like to be said, including people questioning whether censorship is a good public policy. I had some personal experience with this type of campaign in 2001 when a few individuals (with the support of the CJC) were trying to censor the words of David Icke. They alleged his words were anti-Semitic -- and as a result of the Streisand effect I read and found that he was really just a kook that should have been left alone in obscurity. I knew, from asking my Jewish friends what they thought of the policies of the CJC, that these pro-censorship policies were not representative of the views of the wider Canadian Jewish community, but really only of the executive of that specific association. It is very unfortunate that one of this executive has taken his campaign as part of this election.

Like Anthony, I am a strong believer in free speech. A support of free speech doesn't mean supporting speech you like, but fighting to defend the right of people to say things you personally feel are disgusting. When I tried to promote free speech a decade ago I ended up being accused of being anti-Semitic, and separately had people threatening to sue me for defamation for simply documenting what these opponents to free speech were doing. These folks didn't care at all what damage they did by falsely accusing people of being anti-Semitic, or accusing people of being apologists for genocidal activities.

While I strongly disagree with Bernie Farber's long-standing political views, I still support his right to express them. There are, however, appropriate limits to free speech in a free society when it comes to defamation and specific political tactics. Will Mr. Farber's harmful and selfish political campaign damage Anthony's reputation or cause problems at his job? He is a high-school teacher, and I know how the school boards can sometimes not adequately support staff that get caught up in unfounded controversies.

My hope is that more people will read past the bogus headlines to see what is going on. It is not the credibility of Anthony Marco, or his suitability to be a politician, that should be being questioned. We should be questioning whether we want to have people like Bernie Farber elected to represent us in the government, given how little respect he offers to fellow citizens. We also have to question whether the Liberal party of Ontario is still fit to govern, given how willing they have been to stand by and promote this smear campaign. I live in Ottawa South and have asked for some feedback from Liberal candidate Dalton McGuinty about whether he condones this smear campaign. Unless he comes out clearly against what Mr. Farber and supporters have been doing, there is no way I can consider him a credible candidate for my vote.

Why it is important to engage on creators' rights discussions

2011-09-11T14:26:00.013-04:00

Just over a week ago, the Globe and Mail published an article by Kate Taylor that had the sensationalist headline "It’s writers v. professors in the latest war of words". I don't know if it was an editor that created the headline, but it is very misleading as the debate she wrote was more about the different views between different writers than about anyone else. The body of the article did suggest that, "The knowledge community is divided against itself".

She wrote about successful Canadian-born science-fiction writer Cory Doctorow, and how he believes that the radical changes proposed to how communications technology is owned an controlled can not rationally be justified by copyright. As a fellow person with a technical background, he understand how this technology works better than most writers.

When I explain the specific technology under debate I speak about how there are 4 classes of owners (not one), and two digital locks (not one). The 4 classes of owners are content copyright holders, owners of tangible media, software authors and owners of tangible computer hardware.

The most controversial of the two locks is the lock applied to hardware and/or software where the owner of the hardware is specifically denied the keys to what they own. Anyone who has a basic understanding of why we have property rights enshrined not only in domestic law, but the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, can see how denying owners the keys to the locks on what they own can have serious implications. Rather than protecting the rights of owners, the proposed laws specifically prohibit owners from changing the keys to the locks on what they own: making the protection of ones own property rights illegal.

From a narrow authors rights perspective, it should be obvious how their ability to use their own communications tools to create and distribute their own works is threatened by these non-owner locks. Even if we had no consideration for all the other rights threatened by these non-owner locks, we should be rejecting them as an attack on authors' rights.

The second lock is a lock on content which makes the content only interoperable with specific brands of non-owner locked hardware and software. This lock will either drive people to non-owner locked hardware, or drive people to accessing infringing material which is unlocked. Both of these alternatives are harmful to the interests of authors, so the legal protection of these anti-interoperability locks should be rejected as a threat to authors' rights.

Ms. Taylor was correct in identifying that there are writers who believe that these two types of locks are a threat to creators' right and other writes, and other writers who believe they will somehow help their interests. It is critical that those of us who understand that "copy control" is only a marketing term, not a real technology, to participate in discussions. Eventually more people will recognise that these types of locks represent a far greater threat to the interests of writers than any amount of copyright infringement.

While it is true that "users'-rights advocates" oppose anti-interoperability locks on content and non-owner locks on our computing hardware, there are also many writers and other creators that share this opposition. There are a few technology companies that might benefit from the anticompetitive impacts of these locks, but the vast majority of proponents are people inadvertently advocating for changes to the law which will harm their own interests.

One of the other issues mentioned by Ms. Taylor related to Access Copyright, which offers one of many options to the educational community to license educational content. This section was corrected by Paul Davidson, president of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, in a later article in the Globe and Mail with the headline "Pirates of academe? We laugh".

This is a case of anticompetitive behaviour by Access Copyright. It would be as if Canadian Tire claimed "theft" if customers bought a product from Walmart instead. This type of behaviour from Access Copyright is unfortunately not new, and I have been exposed to many advocates for Access Copyright over the years who really think their customers (or in some cases colleagues) in the educational sector are immoral in some way. The more heated the rhetoric from Access Copyright devotees, the less interested their customers will become in paying them for the privilege of being insulted.

It isn't correct to suggest this is a matter of "universities playing hardball with textbook publishers and freelance writers." Access Copyright is a middle-man between writers and universities, and it is quite possible that the alternative licensing methods being explored by universities will be more lucrative for writers. Even for authors who are focused on royalties as a method of payment, Access Copyright's policies have become controversial (See the Creators' Access Copyright blog).

This is not to say that the educational sector is without its faults when it comes to educational copyright. While outside the scope of the current abusive debate, the Council of Ministers of Education did propose a carve-out of provincially chartered educational institutions from copyright. This is a very bad policy for a number of reasons I have outlined in the past. This policy mis-educates our children about how copyright works and would inevitably induce them to infringe outside the classroom. I consider education institutional exceptions to copyright to be a government program, paid for on the backs of copyright holders, masquerading as copyright. I consider it dishonest for provincial Ministers of Education to be proposing pick-pocketing authors, rather than ensuring adequate provincial funding for education.

Many of the problems with institution-specific exceptions to copyright also apply to the blanket licensing promoted by Access Copyright. Copyright is very complex, and if we are worried about students and teachers/professors inadvertently infringing copyright then we need to both clarify and simplify copyright (in future bills), as well a provide unbiased education on copyright to students. On both of these proposals Access Copyright has not been helpful, advocating for making copyright more complex in submissions on copyright reform, as well as providing inaccurate information on copyright (Example: Captain Copyright).

The provincial educational funding issues, educational institutional exceptions to copyright, and related controversies weren't mentioned in the article by Ms. Taylor, but did get discussed in the follow-up comments to the articles and on Twitter.

At least one person suggested on twitter a "Mortal Combat Style" fight between John Degen and myself. I don't enjoy the interactions with John which are an example of the heated discussion that Ms. Taylor was discussing. He starts his commentary on Ms. Taylor's article by suggesting that "ideologues have muddled the whole issue with scary half-truths about copyright and the future of culture". Rather than then talking about his own participation in the copyright debate that could easily be characterised that way, he tore into professional author Cory Doctorow. It shouldn't be surprising that conversations get heated when this is the starting point.

I believe Cory to be one of the most outspoken protector of the rights and interests of authors. He doesn't confuse expanding copyright with protecting authors' rights, given he understands that there can be both too much and too little copyright from the perspective of authors. It is unfortunate to see some people attack Cory, claiming they are doing so in the name of authors' rights. When this happens it is not Cory's qualifications as a creators' rights advocate that come into question, but whether the person attacking is either knowingly or inadvertently harming the interests of authors.

The other person that John referenced in his comment, but didn't name, is University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist. The claim was that Mr. Geist has been "attacking Access Copyright at every turn", when in fact it has been devotees of Access Copyright who have been attacking Michael Geist at every turn. I've been at more than one conference where Geist was insultingly referred to as "he who shall not be named", embarrassingly making analogies between Mr. Geist as the villain in the Harry Potter stories.

Both Michael Geist and Cory Doctorow are moderates in the debate. They neither believe in maximising or minimising copyright, but striking the right balance between the interests of existing copyright holders, new creators, audiences of these works, and society as a whole. These moderates are attacked by both of the extremes: by people who disagree with their strong support of copyright as a tool to protect the rights and interests of authors, as well as those who falsely believe that "if some copyright is good, more must be better".

But... this is politics. One of the ways to make ones own more extreme position seem reasonable is to claim that moderates are radicals. The constant attack by some individuals of people like Cory Doctorow and Michael Geist is an unfortunate but understandable political ploy. Not only do we need to correct the record when these people post incorrect information about the impact of various policies, but we need to challenge them on their fictional misrepresentation of fellow rights activists.

London Trip/Cory Doctorow/Pirate Cinema/Terrorism/Riots

2011-08-18T11:02:00.031-04:00

My wife and I went on a vacation to London, leaving Ottawa on July 18th, and returning August 1'st. While we did the traditional tourist things, this is not what has been stuck in my mind since.

I was a Copyfighter in London, so of course I sent an email to Cory Doctorow to see if we could meet in person. We met on the 26'th at Shoreditch House, his club. Among other things he handed me a discussion draft of his latest young adult book: Pirate Cinema (Third manuscript printing from May 18, 2011).

From the beginning there was a familiarity that I loved from when I read Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. Someone was set in Toronto, and had fictional characters doing things which were part fiction, part science, that made the line between what was real, what could be real, and what was pure fantasy sometimes a bit of a blur.

Pirate Cinema is set in London, surrounding many of the places I had been which made reading it feel like an extension of my vacation. It was, however, a different London than we saw as tourists. The protagonist was 16 when he ran away from home to live in the streets (and abandoned buildings) of London, eating "garbage", and so-on. Arriving in Victoria Station, the book is written from his eyes as if it were written by him to document the events of his recent past.

My wife and I commented when we were in London that we didn't see the social issues we expected to see. Young people have been disenfranchised, with high youth unemployment. Government policies were only one part of the complex things which were causing people to feel disconnected from society. Everything seemed to be calm, with everyone being polite: the only instance we saw of road-rage was once in Greenwich.

We were back in Ottawa when the fire was lit, and London started to burn.

The flames were lit after a peaceful march on 6 August 2011, that was tied to the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan by police. That may have been the spark, but what followed for 5 days is far more complex that will take a very long time to understand. Sure, some out-of-touch politicians are trying to point fingers at the immorality of youth, but reality can't be simplified this way.

This is where science fiction can come in to tell a simpler story. The fictional character of Trent McCauly (AKA: Cecil B. DeVil) left for the streets of London because he felt to blame for his family losing their Internet connection. This caused among other things for his father to lose his job, mother to lose access to medical treatments, and sister to no longer have access to the educational materials she needed to keep up her grades in school. In his eyes he had destroyed his family, felt to be a burden on them, so ran away.

Bad Copyright law is a simple story telling tool for a number of reasons. It has been proposed many times to have Internet connections would be cut off based on the mere accusation of de-minimus copyright infringement by one member of a household. In the case of Trent it was for Appropriation Art, an activity which a growing number of people don't think should be illegal, but instead clearly protected as legitimate creativity by Fair Use style exceptions.

Current proposals for Copyright law expansion are examples of laws where the punishment does not fit, and goes many magnitudes beyond the offence. I've made comparisons between how we treat copyright law and election law, clearly suggesting that if we treated election law with a similar level of severity that the currently ruling Canadian Conservative party would have been de-registered and disbanded.

It is a type of law that demonstrates the hypocrisy that many youth (and adults) feel: that they are criminalised for doing relatively harmless things while a few at the top of the political and economic classes of society are barely given a public tongue-lashing for far more seriously harmful activities. A small theft will get you jail time, but a big theft will get you a government bail-out.

There is a truth that these politicians seem to be blind to: once you make relatively harmless activities have excessive punishments, this reduces the social and moral deterrents to someone carrying out harmful activities (violence, vandalism, theft of tangible property) that may even have lesser punishments.

I find the mere suggestion by a politician that cutting off of the Internet based on copyright infringement to be embarrassing and an example of the type of out-of-touch thinking that leads to the break up of social cohesiveness we saw in London. But this is only one tiny example of bad public policy what is clearly a much larger issue, but the complete silliness and realistic feeling of this example made for good fiction in Cory's book.

When I arrived in London the politicians and much of the mainstream media were gripped by the silliness of the phone hacking scandal. I am no fan of Rupert Murdoch's media empire (that's an understatement), but why is it that when the government wants to surveil average citizens (IE: warrant-less wiretaps proposed in Canada under so-called "Lawful Access") that this is considered a necessity, but when the private sector surveils politicians and those connected with politicians it is a big scandal that goes on for weeks. As much as I loathe the fiction that much of the media passes off as news, and the harmful activities they will carry out to collect "evidence" of that fiction, I put far more blame on the hypocrisy of the politicians who always want to point fingers at someone else as being the perpetrator of immoral/illegal activities. Some level of accountability and responsibility must eventually rise to the top.

When I visited speakers corner I was treated to a man trying to clarify that terrorist activities carried out in the name of Islam are not only wrong under the laws of every country, but also against all the teachings of Islam. This is common and necessary education to far too many in the west who seem to equate their religion with good, and other religions being evil.

It was a white woman (only woman speaker there) that threw me: she believed in Brittan for the British, and was opposed to multiculturalism. She was condoning the white Christian terrorist Anders Behring Brevik who had killed so many youth days earlier, based on his political opposition to multiculturalism.

There were real important and divisive issues gripping London, some of which could even be easily seen by a tourist, and the politicians seemed gripped in the theatre of comparatively minor issues -- issues that were largely of their own creation.

There are raves and unlawful movie screenings (content and location :-), but no riots in Cory's book. It is written for youth, and like his other young adult books doesn't have a condescending tone or attempt to be moralistic towards young adults. There are obvious messages in the book about actively participating in society and politics which can only help readers feel empowered rather than disenfranchised. The villains are some politicians and lobbiests: quite the opposite to the villains that some politicians and lobbiests are trying to pass even more drastic "tough on crime" measures against. I say some, as there are politicians written about that are heroic, even if not the most powerful of the politicians.

I don't know when the book will be on the shelves and legally free online as with his other books, but I suspect it is clear that I highly recommend people of all ages read it. While fiction, it would make for good reading by politicians as it may help them get a better grasp of the non-fictional world around them.

#PAB2011

2011-06-30T10:15:00.005-04:00

I attended my first PAB last weekend. Even though it is in Ottawa, I hadn't heard of it until the folks at DyscultureD started to mention it. My initial thought was to crash the party a bit to meet with them while they were in Ottawa, but after looking at the schedule I decided to sign up and attend everything. It also turns out in hindsight that people wouldn't have been happy if I had crashed.

I'm not a PODcaster, and that is beyond the fact I think the term is too closely associated with my political opponents at Apple. This is an artist conference, and I'm not really an artist: I've been invited on Netcasts, I take pictures (moving and still), record audio, and I blog (really?), but I do it primarily as a form of political expression rather than artistic expression. I have attended a number of conferences in the last decade that were artist focused, and have learned quite a bit which is helpful in understanding how others see the area of policy and politics I have been focused on the last decade: technology policy, which includes things such as copyright/patent, CRTC/broadcasting, Network Neutrality, technological protection measures.

So, what did I get out of the conference?

Lets get the embarrassing thought out of the way: I would have liked to hang out more with the DyscultureD crew, but felt like I was being a fanboy rather than a friend when following them around. I listen to them every week (Multiple times for Anthony), and have come to know at least one aspect of them. It isn't a mutual interaction. This was their first time being together as a group in person, and it should be expected that they would want to focus their free time on each other. I am just some guy who happens to share some of the same interests as many of the topics discussed each week on their show.

Listening to the beginning of Dyscultured Episode 140, Andrew was suggesting he felt there was a bit of a hierarchy to the conference. I think this should be expected as it wasn't as much a conference, but a community. Some people have been participants for many years, while others (like myself) were there for the first time and were more spectators than participants.

On the boat cruise Andrew asked me if I would come again and possibly suggest a talk. I suspect I would have to wait until next year to answer that. The only thing I might have something to add to a conference is discussion of Copyright and possibly the perspective of a software author/techie, but don't think/know if either would be a fit.

There is nothing wrong with being a spectator, even at a conference that was clearly more of a community. Everyone was inviting and friendly to the new faces, and no matter how shy you were you still felt welcome.

Now if only I were less shy....

The theme of the conference was stories, but one of the most common themes of the stories was family. My favorite presentation was the less formal one Anthony Marco gave as part of Sylvain Grand'maison's "Family Jewels" talk. With some photographs and music as background, he gave an amazingly timed talk on camping with the family. I definitely felt an "Unattended Momement" (theme of his early formal talk) when listening. I grew up camping -- traveling around Canada and parts of the USA, staying in camp grounds. I had to very deliberately remember I was in public to retain composure....

I have been thinking a lot about family, camping and related things in recent years since my dad died. I think he knew how grateful I was for all those trips when we were younger, and being a very participating father.

There were things we didn't see eye-to-eye on: He was an auto-mechanic and after a knee injury he became a auto-mechanics teacher. I, on the other hand, have never had a drivers license and feel personally owned transportation is very harmful to the health of society and our species.

But... as I said when offering a eulogy, we had more in common than we were different as far as the importance we put on doing what we felt was good works for family, friends and society as a whole. His own cars never quite worked right as he spent more time fixing everyone elses (as a friend for free, not just professionally), and my own computers are often inadequately maintained (or just out-of-date) as I spend my techie time helping everyone else.

Another speaker I enjoyed was Ottawa's own Rpbin Browne who spoke about helping people with no voice to tell their stories. While I love the social justice message which is close to my heart and mind, I also like his speaking style. The style reminds me of president Obama, even if I trust Robin's sincerity -- something I can't say about Obama :-) I also liked the more familiar face at a conference where I knew so few others.

So, it is time for me to Just Hit Publish (Nod to Sue Murphy) on this post, and get to all the other writing I have in my TODO list. While I keep getting distracted with ideas for the Digital Copyright Canada blog (Access Copyright is management and not a union, Apple wants a patent monopoly on being a douchebag and remotely-disabling your camera, etc), the next thing I have to finish is my submission to the CRTC for their so-called "Fact-finding" exercise on the over-the-top programming services in the Canadian broadcasting system. Doubt they will get many facts, and don't expect my submission to have much impact, but it is always worth trying to get some new ideas in front of the commission.

Why I'm changing my vote for the upcoming Ontario election.

2011-06-14T07:23:00.003-04:00

There is an election coming up in Ontario on October 6, 2011.

In the last Ontario election I voted for Dalton McGuinty. I like his brother David, and I thought : why not.

This election the issue that is most on my mind for provincial politics is the HST. I think it is wrong to have added tax to labour in the form of adding HST to services which previously only had GST and not PST.

There are many reasons, some simply relating to job creation and others relating to sustainability, why a tax shift from labour onto other resources such as energy is appropriate. I have been a long-time supporter of the Green Tax Shift, before there was a Canadian political party that also supported it (Greens, and temporarily the federal Liberals).

An increase in the cost of services means that purchasing products that may replace services (replace rather than repair, etc) becomes comparatively cheaper, a policy that heads us in exactly the opposite direction to what we should be doing if we had any thoughts for the future.

After the anti-Green Tax Shift of the HST being added to services I wrote a letter to my MPP in Ontario, Dalton McGuinty, saying that I wouldn't be voting for him in the next election largely due to this harmful policy.

As if to remove their candidates from my consideration, both the NDP and PC party leaders have stated that they want to remove HST from gasoline at the pump and other energy. This makes the NDP and PC policies worse than the Liberal policy, since it not only agrees to the shift of taxation onto services, but removed yet more taxes from energy.

It is nonsense to say that removing taxes from energy will "help the poor". A policy aimed at the poor should be focused on the poor -- you don't subsidise everyone for the sake of a few. You also don't subsidise people for wasteful consumption in scenarios where alternatives exist. There may not be a substitute for energy to heat ones home, but there are many alternatives when it comes to transportation.

At one point I thought I would vote for the candidate most able to defeat Dalton McGuinty, but given the PC party is promoting an even worse policy I'm not going that route. I could vote for the lesser of the candidates from these three parties which may turn out to be Dalton McGuinty, or I could return to what I did in the 1990's and simply vote Green.

I haven't met the Ontario Green candidate for Ottawa South yet, but I suspect on this area of policy there won't be any conflict given the green tax shift has been a long-time policy of the domestic and international greens.

Format of pipermail/Mailman database/ files?

2011-03-27T11:45:00.003-04:00

I'm wanting to write a tool that looks at some pipermail archives and creates a MessageID to URL table.

If I run `strings /var/lib/mailman/archives/public/discuss/database/2011-March-article` I can see that the information that I want is in these database files. If I look at /usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/pipermail.py it looks like this is a baddb formatted file.

If I try to write a python script to read these files, all I get is:

bsddb._db.DBInvalidArgError: (22, 'Invalid argument -- /var/lib/mailman/archives/public/discuss/database/2011-March-article: unexpected file type or format')

Anyone have any ideas? I'm not a Python programmer, so it is quite possible that I'm just not understanding how to do things in Python. Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

Note: This is python-2.4.3-27.el5_5.3 , on a CentOS 5.5 machine. I'm running the following script on the same machine that is writing the files, so there won't be a version mismatch.

#!/usr/bin/python

import os, sys
import bsddb

path = "/var/lib/mailman/archives/public/discuss/database/2011-March-article"

db = bsddb.btopen(path)

Byron Sonne is Still in Prison

2011-01-03T09:14:00.003-05:00

I sent the following as a letter to my federal member of parliament, David McGuinty. I suspect it would be useful for others to send similar letters to their MP if this issue disturbs them as well.

Mr McGuinty, MP for my riding of Ottawa South,

I wanted to make sure you are aware of a citizen from the security/hacker community I am part of that is still in prison from before the G20 summit.

There is an audio story about the issue:
http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/searchengine/index.cfm?page_id=613&action=blog&subaction=viewPost&post_id=13995&blog_id=485

"The strange, suppressed story of Byron Sonne, the G-20 security hacker who has been held, unconvicted, for 6 months and counting. An interview with technology journalist Jesse Hirsh."

I find this very disturbing. There is a media ban on talking about the issue, with this being a case of a security person investigating the security measures being set up for the G20. In our community, security research and transparency are assumed good things and not something that should ever be considered harmful. While I am more aware of what I consider to be counter-productive laws given my policy work, most in the community are entirely unaware. From everything I have heard so far this isn't even a very political person.

As the Liberals question the violations of civil liberties that were part of the G-20 summit, please ensure that this issue comes up as well.

Russell McOrmond
<full contact information removed, but part of letter. Make sure you always include your address with postal code in letters to your MP. >

Separate thought: It is interesting how TVO has been acting as public television, with various TVO journalists bringing forward stories from the perspective of the general public. As I watch CBC reporting it is increasingly hard to differentiate from CTV. This is something that will inevitably come up during debates about CBC funding/etc.

OpenOffice.org support in Ottawa? ...and the future of LibreOffice.

2010-12-16T10:56:00.001-05:00

I just received a call from someone looking for support for OpenOffice in the Ottawa area. They did a search, and my company came up. While I would have had better answers for them in the past, I realize that with all the changes initiated this year that I am not as up to speed on the current situation as I once was. I'm offering what I know, in the hopes that other people will add comments.

In the past the lead developer and primary copyright holder for OpenOffice.org was Sun. Sun was sold to Oracle in April 2009, and the relationship between Oracle and the various Open Source communities that Sun had participated in have been very strained. In the case of the OpenOffice.org project, the lead developers within and outside of what was previously Sun have largely left to create the The Document Foundation, which produces a community driven derivative of OpenOffice.org called LibreOffice.

The second largest participant in OpenOffice.org was Novell, which was acquired by Attachmate Corporation in November 2010. While the inability of Oracle to play well with others was well known, and the fallout between them and various development communities was predictable, the future plans of Attachmate are not as well known.

In the past both Sun and Novell offered corporate support and training for OpenOffice.org based office suites. Both offered their own compiled and branded version, with Sun using the name StarOffice and Novell simply calling it Novell OpenOffice. Whenever a larger client came to me asking about support, I could easily let them know about these larger companies offering support. During this transition, I'm not sure what to be recommending.

I believe there is a very bright future for LibreOffice. Having Sun retain copyright through Joint Copyright Assignment agreements scared away many potential corporate and individual participants in the project. This will no longer be an issue, and I expect that once we get past this transition phase that there will be more commercial support for LibreOffice than there ever was for OpenOffice.org

The question I have for the community is what they would recommend during this interim. If you offer commercial support in Ottawa or elsewhere in Canada, please post a comment with additional information. If you are an employee of Oracle or Attachmate and have something to add about the participation of your company, I would be very interested to hear about that as well.

Please do NOT remove HST from heating fuel

2010-10-23T10:23:00.003-04:00

As someone who disagrees with the HST I have been receiving notices from the Ontario NDP and the federal NDP about their disagreements with the HST. As is often the case, just because someone disagrees with something doesn't mean they disagree for a compatible reason.

Why I disagree with the HST

I consider the HST to be a tax shift from products onto services. Services were previously taxed with the GST, but not PST, and thus services only had the 5% GST applied. Now in Ontario services have to charge 13% (an increase of the 8% from Ontario).

This will mean that products will seem comparatively less expensive than services in those scenarios where one is competing with each other, such as repair/reuse compared to replacement of damaged goods. This will have a net negative impact on our environment.

This is in my mind the opposite of a Green Tax Shift type of initiative which would tend to be removing taxes from services and placing them onto products.

If the HST were to be removed entirely from services, then this would have the desired effect.

Why I disagree with the NDP

The NDP want to do the opposite, which is remove the HST from heating fuel. Not only do I believe that HST should remain on heating fuel, I am a strong believer in there being a carbon tax applied in a government revenue-neutral way. The policy should be for the price of heating fuel to go up, and the costs of labour to go down (No HST on services, lower income taxes for individuals, etc).

In other words, the policy that I think would be good for Canada and Canadians, and the tax policy promoted by the NDP, are the opposite. Disagreeing with the HST doesn't tell you anything.

Who needs Fox North when we already have CBC's The Current?

2010-10-07T09:24:00.004-04:00

The radio was on this morning with CBC's The Current. The topic was municipalities and the licensing of massage parlours that range up to places that offer body rubs. In the wake of some narrow aspects of prostitution laws being struck down by an Ontario court, it is now in vogue to have talk shows where people express their views on this topic. There was the ludicrous suggestion by some social conservatives that if a municipality made any money from licensing activities of a sexual nature that they are essentially pimps. CBC's The Current decided to expand on and do a show promoting this ludicrous suggestion.

Normally a journalist will find a variety of people with a variety of views, and allow them to have a discussion. Unfortunately in this case Anna Maria Tremonti decided to impose her own morality onto every question, essentially having her and her social conservative guest from out east gang up on a Guelph city councillor.

I didn't even hear the Guelph councillor express her moral views on the subject, only the practicality of issues that a municipality should be dealing with. She took the high road, when Anna Maria and her other guest took the low road.

I found the whole show embarrassing. I find it funny that some social conservatives claim that the CBC is not centrist but left-wing. I think there is a wide variety of political views expressed by persons on the CBC, and I think Anna Maria demonstrated where she stands on this particular issue.

So, where do I stand on this question?

Each of us has professions we don't agree with, or sometimes even find morally offensive. I am a make love not war person living in a make war not love country. North Americans are very forgiving and even promoting of violence, but can't handle sexuality. Violent professions from the military to some sports are promoted as things we are supposed to be proud of, while anything even remotely sexual is something we are told we should be ashamed of.

I don't think that way. I believe that sexuality between consenting adults is a wonderful thing. I am always very clear about the words "consenting", and the related word "adults" given I don't think younger people are mature enough to be considered consenting.

In my mind legalising and licensing sex related professions is the only reasonable way forward. It not only legalises activities which should never have been illegal in the first place, but it also allows for necessary monitoring of these professions to verify the "consenting" aspect. The more these things are driven underground, the more dangerous these professions become, and the more instances we will see of non-consensual activities.

While I will express my views, I do not try to impose my views on others. It would be nice if other people did the same thing, and stopped attacking anyone who has a different set of professions they disagree with or trying to create laws which impose their own particular morality on society.

Update on Oct 14. Show titled Municipal Pimping is posted to the CBC site. Vicki Beard was the City Councillor in Guelph, Ontario. Gloria McCluskey was the City Councillor in Halifax.

Replying to: words and their power

2010-07-06T09:56:00.000-04:00

Replying to: johndegen.com: words and their power

John,

You can go ahead and name names in my case. I participate in these forums under my real name as I stand by my comments, and will continue to fight for creators rights and free speech rights against ideas (and sometimes persons) that I feel are harming these rights.

I am the (or one) person who is saying that if filtering is happening by someone that is not an authority, government or otherwise, then that filtering is not censorship. Having your SPAM filters too high, or deleting messages you don't like for any reason from a private forum you administrate, is not censorship.

We are both disturbed by each others comments. I find it disturbing to see someone (ab)use the word censorship in this manner as, in my mind, it belittles victims of actual censorship. I have been fighting for free speech likely as long as you have (given we are about the same age), possibly longer online (just because I'm a geek that got online as early as I could).

My line for free speech is further on the unfiltered side than most, given I think that our current hate speech and defamation laws are a bit too strong. I've been critical of the Canadian Human Rights Commission for its desire to censor (see -- authority, with power of the state) speech. I may find the speech they wish to filter disgusting, and I am not personally interested to be subjected to it, but that doesn't mean I believe it should be censored. In fact, I wish there was a government funded body whose mandate it was to "correct the record" on such hateful speech, rather than giving the speech more power by attempting to censor it.

I don't have the agree with the reasons for the filtering by any given proprietor of a forum. In this case, I don't as I could have guessed you would have used the filtering in your ongoing desire to discredit anyone associated with the Fair Copyright for Canada label. You see, FCFC isn't a group with leadership, but a label used by people who have a relatively compatible philosophy on copyright. While Michael Geist is seen as coining the term (I attribute it to Laura Murray), that's the extent of it -- he is not a "leader" in the management sense, only a thought leader.

It's clear you don't share that philosophy, and label nearly every creator associated with that label as "copy left" (Meaning "Other, not like me"). That’s fine for me, and I'm used to the people who call themselves the "copy right" to be trying to label me as something other than a creators' rights advocate. I may feel constantly insulted by this incorrect labelling, but I'm not going to personally filter based on that.

I think Jason lashed out at Michael because Michael didn't back the decision to use filters in the York Region forum. In my case I did back the decision, not because I thought the specific filtering was something I would have done personally, but because I will fight for the right of forum proprietors to make that decision for themselves. As I indicated, I don't need proof that the decision was justified: I just support the right or proprietors of forums to make that decision.

Unlike you and I who have become used to disagreeing with fellow creators, including ones we consider to be quite insulting at times (we feel that of each other), Jason didn't see the point in continuing to be a target. While the two of us learn about our own positions by having ongoing conversations with people we disagree with, and continue despite family and friends telling us to get out, Jason took a different path.

But lets chat for a moment about the mixed message I keep hearing about Michael Geist from those who self-identify as the "copy right". I hear often that Michael is somehow associated with "pirates" and "thieves" because he allows comments on his blog from people with certain ideas. I suspect the whole "users rights" advocate label doesn't come from things that Michael says, but the fact that people with "users rights" views dominate the unfiltered comments on his blog.

I then hear Michael accused of being a co-censor because some group using the Fair Copyright for Canada meme in their title filtered some comments. Your whole slew of messages on twitter and this blog started with a false accusation against Michael.

So, which is it: Does Michael not filter enough or does he filter too much?

Personally, I think he filters far less than I would be willing to. In the forums I host/administrate I don't allow anonymous postings. At the bare minimum a contributor must sign up and have an email address verified. While my preference is real names and real people, the system allows pseudonymous.

On Blogger I let these pseudonymous postings go up right away, but with an email notification. I allow any registered user to comment (including OpenID).

On digital-copyright.ca I wait until I've seen a few useful comments before I allow messages to be posted right away from a contributor rather than going into a moderation queue. Accounts can be OpenID accounts or accounts created specifically on digital-copyright.ca.

I really don't support anonymous comments as it encourages a form of "road rage" on the series of tubes -- err information superhighway. Because of this I tend to ignore the comments on sites like Michael's or most of the mainstream media.

Comments may not always be friendly or agree with a world view I agree with, but I respect comments that are expressed by a real person who is willing to stand behind those comments.

Traditional definitions in the copyright debate.

2010-07-02T13:17:00.000-04:00

On social issues I consider myself a pretty liberal parson, and am OK with people being whoever they want to be. My limits come when those activities harm others: your right to swing your cane ends at my nose, and all that.

After being told I represented the "copyleft" so often by folks associated with Access Copyright, I decided to do some thinking (and writing) on that. Far from being a redefinition of an existing term, it is a new term that turns out to be useful for understanding some of the conflicts between creators in the copyright debate.

One thing I get frustrated with, however, is when people abuse language by redefining terms to fit their temporary purposes. There are terms that are very heavily loaded that should be used in their dictionary meaning, or not at all. One of those terms that is all too loosely abused is calling people anti-Semitic, often levelled at people who think the country of Israel should be treated as and critiqued like any other, and who ignore the non-secular nature of that country.

During the G20 protests I ended up hearing another abuse, but not from someone associated with those protests. John Degen discovered after many months he had been barred from the Fair Copyright for Canada (York Region Chapter) by the administrator for that forum, Independent Journalist Jason Koblovsky.

To try to rally the troops for those who support his particular political philosophy (See the "copy left" discussion and you'll see John represents a conservative creators' rights philosophy), John started to make up a fiction that he had been censored.

I'm getting used to disagreeing with John on policy, and we each seem to believe that the policies that the other one is promoting is harmful to the interests of professional creators. I could not, however, abide by his abuse of the term "censorship" to refer to the manager of a forum not allowing him to participate in that managers forum. While free speech demands that people have a right to say what they want to say, within some limits (such as defamation/etc), there is no right to say this wherever you want. The managers of discussions forums are within their right to manage membership in their forums any way they want, and they don't need to have a reason at all to disallow anyone from participating. In this case the manager even offered to let John back in if he wanted, with the request that John behave.

So, rather than behaving, John posts a few articles to his BLOG and tries to draw attention to government officials of his non-censorship.

Frist, he posts how fair is Fair? how balanced is Balanced?.

In this rant he includes some things I have said about him: "a non-techie who doesn’t understand software, a copyright maximalist," ... ", a “creator of the past,”"

These are of course taken out of context, and if put into context it would be hard for John to disagree.

The first is an observation: that while many of us in the debate have decades of technical experience, including as software authors, John is not one of them. That is not an insult, and in this observation he is in the majority of citizens who are not technical people who have spent the time to understand cryptography and other such technologies. Most people who don't understand something will find trusted experts to rely on. While I am clearly not trusted by John, I am an experienced professional in this area.

The second is also an observation, not an insult. I have heard John say many things over the years that essentially amount to: some copyright is good, so more must be better. Making copyright "stronger", meaning tilted more in favour of existing copyright holders, does not automatically help creators. Those who believe that stronger copyright is better copyright are quite accurately called "copyright maximalists". I'll let John decide if he wants to respond and say that he doesn't agree that "stronger copyright is better copyright", given this is the essence of the policies he has promoted over the years I have known him.

The third comment is in the context of Lawrence Lessig's s presentation from 2002 where he said:

Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
Ours is less and less a free society.

If one looks at the policies that John promotes, it is clear that he's more focused on policies that would benefit existing copyright holders rather than those that would most benefit new copyright holders building on that past creativity. This is tied to the "copyright maximalist" observation, given more copyright favours existing copyright, while more creator-focused limitations and exceptions (fair dealings for follow-on creators) benefit the next generation of creators.

But, he wants to try to turn these observations of the different viewpoints in this political debate into insults: anyone who disagrees with his political philosophy are doing so not because they want to protect the rights of creators, but because they want to insult John.

As he tries to attack the credibility of Fair Copyright for Canada which includes a near full spectrum of creators and non-creators interests in copyright, he is also trying to promote the Balanced Copyright for Canada group that only represents a narrow potion of the conservative side of the copyright debate. (Please read Is there a copy left vs copy right?. I don't mean conservative in the same way as the Conservative party, or social conservative, or fiscal conservative. Conservatism in the copyright debate is a different thing).

So, we have one group that is bottom-up organised and includes the centrists and the left of the political debate, and another group that is top-down organised primarily by the incumbent record labels that represent the remaining minority political philosophy in copyright. And John, who seems to have self-identified himself with that far-right conservative copyright philosophy was removed from a forum because the manager thought he was part of a smear campaign against that larger set of constituencies (and Michael Geist in particular).

In the article John says, "Consumer advocate and occasional law professor, Michael Geist".

Mr Geist is a law professor who has a centrist creators' rights philosophy. He has gone out of his way to expand his educational roll beyond the classroom and into the general public, trying to educate people about current law and interpretations of proposed laws. He has been a great ally for creators in this debate.

While some adherents to conservative copyright views have rejected him as helping creators, I suspect a majority of fellow creators would disagree with that assessment. In fact, I consider John's usage of that language in his blog to be part of the smear campaign that John often claims he is not participating in.

Why was I not surprised that someone had barred John, or that people were concerned with his motives, given the language he uses to describe people who have different ideas than him on how to protect creators' rights?

The beginning started quite typical for our conversations recently: an accusation by John against others (sometimes Geist, sometimes myself, sometimes someone else entirely), and then my snide remark back. In this case it was Fair Copyright for Canada being attacked, a group that I support even if I'm not an active member (I'm not a big Facebook person, and rarely log on).

John: how fair is Fair Copyright? http://bit.ly/9hTkjr I've been kicked out of a populist copyright discussion group for defending artists 3:46 PM Jun 24th via web.

Me: @jkdegen We will continue to disagree that the policies you are promoting are a defence of the interests of artists.

John: @russellmcormond thanks for your support for my freedom of expression - sheesh

Me: @jkdegen Stating publicly that I disagree with your policies and your smere campaign against Geist doesn't harm your freedoms.

Things turned worse when John tried to claim that his being removed from a chapter forum was somehow censorship. He went further to use @mentions to cabinet ministers Moore and Clement about this fake censorship. Clearly ministers of the government had better things to do that weekend then be distracted by false accusations of censorship, especially since this was during the G8/G20 meetings.

There is no "blame the victim", as John was not a victim of anything. There was no censorship, and John is a very aggressive promoter of his political philosophy who can't claim he is a victim when people respond to his public comments and disagree with his political philosophy.

His interactions with creators' rights activists who have different political philosophies have been dismissive, largely suggesting that his political philosophy helps creators while everyone else is wrong. I've observed him many times partake in the "he who shall not be named" smear campaign against Michael Geist, along with fellow conservative creators.

When someone accused him of being unfriendly towards Fair Copyright for Canada participants, and being part of a smear campaign against Michael Geist, I didn't need to join yet another forum and read new examples of these themes . I had already seen them at Copycamp and other discussion forums for a few years now.

So, John aggressively promotes a political philosophy that creators in Fair Copyright for Canada disagree with, and then he feels he is a victim when people don't just let his views stand idly without comment.

Sheesh...

When the above discussed rant didn't go as planned, John then added attack of the tweets - "Fairness" strikes back. I'm not sure what John's intent is here, but I feel the right to respond given he copied some of my tweets into the article.

@jkdegen I am blaming you for belittling the concept of #censorship by abusing the word! @FreeTheInternet @TonyClement_MP @mpjamesmoore

@jkdegen @jkoblovsky @TonyClement_MP @mpjamesmoore And even then you can't tell #censorship from a manager/proprietor asking you to leave?

@jkdegen As you continue to misuse the word #censorship , you only help clarify why you were removed from that forum by its Creator/manager.

Anyone with a dictionary (to look up the word "censorship") and the time to look at the times on the tweet streams will not agree with John's version of events in his blog article. After being as aggressive as he has been, he is now trying to get sympathy. I can only believe it is aimed at fellow conservatives, and is under the hope that they are true conservatives that won't look up the entire discussion and find out what other creators are saying.

I've been asked in private more than once why I still participate in conversations with John given we have so much we disagree with. I believe I learn more by communicating with people I disagree with than those I agree with. I don't want to be stuck in a bubble. Unlike other conservatives in the copyright debate who just like to broadcast their views one-way, John is quite willing to engage in pubic conversation. I have learned from and through him quite a bit about why I believe the things that I do. It is just unfortunate that I often learn what I believe will help Canadian creators by realising that I am disagreeing with John.

My having these conversations in public is also potentially helpful for other creators who hadn't yet thought about what type of political philosophy they subscribe to. They want policies that help creators, and may not have realised that there is not "one true way" to do this. They may also realise that some of the people who conservative creators claim are anti-copyright, "babyish" or "extremists" are in fact centrist or liberal creators' rights advocates who may better represent their views.

Side-note: An irony for those who read this blog. John Degen has been reading and posting quotes from Jaron Lanier's book: You are not a Gadget. Why am I not surprised John and Jaron share ideas? *smile*

Thanks Mike : G-20 on the wrong path.

2010-07-02T09:37:00.000-04:00

Mike Nickerson has been one of those friends/acquaintances I've known for a long time, having met fairly early on when I moved to Ottawa in the 1980's. Among other things he runs something called the Sustainability Project - 7th Generation Initiative. While much of my personal policy focus over recent years has been on exclusive rights run amok, something I consider linked to sustainability, I have been a supporter of his project for some time.

It's nice to see some actual policy commentary about the G20, which I read in a message he sent out to his contacts. He suggested sending letters to the editor, but I am just going to reproduce his letter here to what may be a totally different audience in the hopes it will spark others to think about these issues too.

To the Editor:

When the G20 met, there was talk about the need for structural change in the global economy. While this is true, there is little evidence that the world's leaders acknowledge the fundamental change that has rendered the old system obsolete.

Human activity has expanded to the point where the overall size of the global economy is a problem. Supplies of energy, fresh water, soil fertility and rare earth metals, among other resource issues and pollution issues including greenhouse gases, accumulating garbage and toxins trespassing within our bodies are increasingly in the news. These issues are all warnings that humankind is filling our planets capacity to support us.

As economics is presently structured, a 3% growth rate, world wide, is considered healthy, tho not robust. At 3%, human activity would double in 24 years. This means that in the time it takes for a baby to grow up, we could fill another planet, as abundant as Earth, to the point where we were also stretching its limits. This much growth cannot happen on the single planet that we occupy. Is it a wonder that growth falters?

The necessary structural change is like the change that happens when an adolescent reaches physical maturity. Physical growth is replaced by a sense of justice and responsibility. Only when our leaders start talking about structural change that would be fair to all, while respecting our planet's size, can we expect significant improvements in the world's economic outlook and the long-term future of the grandchildren.

Sincerely, Mike Nickerson
Lanark, Ontario

- 30 -

I kinda giggle when I hear someone talking about maturity. I've said for years that our advancement of natural sciences and technology have greatly outstripped our advancement of social sciences, and we are all feeling the costs of this. We have such smart individuals, but as societies we are currently so immature -- and in the social sciences I feel the self-called "developed" nations are the least developed.

Something to think about, the day after the 143'rd Canada Day. We are so young, and have such a long way to go....

reader & writer & many more chat some more about Copyright

2010-06-13T10:46:00.000-04:00

Author John Degen has posted some fictional conversations between a writer and a reader on his blog (June 9, June 10). I say it is fictional as it ignores how the relevant technology works, and thus not only the lack of clarity of the relationships between writers and readers but also the fact that there is a technology company as intermediary that separates there from being much of a relationship at all between writers and readers. It depicts some rare moment where all the parties involved have the same understanding of the relationship, likely because this is really just a case of John having a conversation with himself.

While I offered a serious response on the IT World Canada blog, I thought it might be amusing to offer a silly response here (using the same blogger he uses, so possibly might encourage some conversation here as well).

The scene... It is the year 2010. With any new form of communications technology in the last 30 years there have been people who have claimed that they have a technological measure that can be used to stop people from communicating things which other people don't want them to communicate. Countries like China has adopted these technical measures to target political dissidents, and western copyright holders have tried to use them to stop copyright infringement. We see the spectacle of alleged human rights activist Bono saying that the West should adopt the "great firewall" policies of China in order to keep citizens in check.

While these technologies have never been effective, and have in fact encouraged people to carry out the type of speech that the technologies were intended to reduce, the supporters of these technologies have not backed down. There have always been snake-oil salesmen willing to sell to less scientific public. In this case they are selling a Trojan horse which will (if successful) enrich these specific technology companies at the expense of all their customers (creative industries and audiences alike), their competitors, and the economy/society as a whole.

Entertainment industry: Nothing has changed in the last 20 years except that people are infringing our copyright. That must be enough proof that infringement alone is responsible for any lost sales.

Music and Movie fan: You only make content available for technology which I do not own, or a subset of technology that my friends own. I have other places my money is going such as cell phone plans, etc, etc. This is why I have not purchased your latest movie/music.

Entertainment industry: If you don't buy our stuff, it must mean you are a pirate. Piracy is the only thing that exists. (holding ears) La La La La

Business Software Alliance and Entertainment Software Alliance: Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain!

Entertainment Industry to Government: We have proof that copyright infringement is devastating our industry. Nothing has changed in the last 20 years except that people are infringing our copyright, and here is how much we claim we have lost. We must stop this at all costs.

Independent software authors, engineers, cryptographers, and mathematicians: The technologies the entertainment industry is looking for do not exist. You can protect messages such that a third party cannot intercept a decipher the message, but you can't protect a message such that it can both be readable and unreadable to the intended audience at the same time. And wait, didn't you just include brick-and-mortar retail in your alleged losses, something that you yourself are helping along when you offer legal downloads?

Montgomery "Scotty" Scott: You cannot change the laws of physics.

John Degen: Dammit Jim, I'm a sports writer, not a software author, engineer, cryptographer or mathematicisn. You claim that what I want can't exist, but there are these folks over here willing to sell it to me.

Business Software Alliance and Entertainment Software Alliance: Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain!

Russell McOrmond: Can you give me an example of online sharing of your work where you believe that these technologies, even if they could ever exist in the real world, could help you?

Folks associated with Access Copyright member organisations: You, all your engineering and math geek friends, and especially MG (who we are so afraid of we won't name), and anyone who doesn't blindly believe that we are being harmed must be pirates. You associate with pirates, thieves.. Oh, sorry, I meant to say you are terrorists -- ya, that's the ticket.

Russell McOrmond: Before copyright can help a software author, we need technology owners to have the right to make their own software choices so that they can choose our software. What you are asking for will, if successful, devistate my business and yet not enrich you at all in return. Why don't you respect the rights of fellow creators?

Access Copyright crowd: You aren't one of us, one of us, one of us. You're a geek not an artist. You go away and have your own copyright, and leave us alone. We don't understand how our abuse of software and technology, and laws which regulate software and technology, has anything to do with software and technology.

Business Software Alliance and Entertainment Software Alliance: Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain!

You get the idea...

I believe that misapplied and misunderstood technical measures have been a larger factor responsible for lost sales than non-commercial copyright infringement. The statistics used are largely bogus, and include in their alleged harm ongoing changes to the marketplace such as the transition to legal online retail. Some less technologically literate copyright holders (most non-software copyright holders?) have been more willing to trust the snake-oil Trojan-horse providers from the technology industry, rather than independent software authors, engineers, cryptographers, mathematicians or other people who they should be trusting. And at the end of the day, rather than trying to make money, these copyright holders are whining to the government to change laws in the very ways they are being warned to avoid for their own sake.

It is one thing that these copyright holders aren't interested in learning how to use technology to increase rather than decrease their bottom line, but it is another thing when they insist on taking me down with them.

Do people have anything they would like to add?

Comments to Bill C-32 Clause-by-clause notes

2010-06-03T14:39:00.000-04:00

Please reply to this article with any comments you may have about the Bill C-32 Clause-by-clause notes I authored. My intention is to keep that document updated with whatever feedback I receive.

Status of my move away from legacy phone/cable companies

2010-05-20T08:56:00.001-04:00

After the legacy phone companies effectively won at the CRTC with the Network Neutrality policy debate, and the nonsense of the Broadcasters vs. Broadcast undertakings in (Stop TV Tax/ Local TV matters), I decided to stop being a customer of any of these companies.

I haven't been a direct customer of the phone or cable companies for Internet access for nearly a decade now. I had an ISDN line from Bell for a few years in the 1990's, and had an early ADSL from Sympatico until DSL service was available from other providers. I have since been a customer of third party ISPs as I have found the service from native Internet companies to always be superior to old-economy phone or cable companies.

I'm still stuck with the connection from my ISP to my home being alleged to be "owned" by Bell. The CRTC has so far given Bell the ability to treat this wire as their property, even though the wires exist because of a right-of-way exception to property rights (to put the cables above and below public and private property).

I asked about Fiber, but it is still not viable for home users. Someone at Atria Networks gave me a ballpark figure of a $10000 build charge, $500/month for the endpoint, plus whatever Internet bandwidth I used. I have been told that third-party ISPs are increasingly being able to offer Internet over cable. If I can get a cable connection that is hands-off to the intermediary, then I'll likely switch from DSL. It would be ideal if Teksavvy were able to offer connections like this in Ottawa.

At the end of last year I switched my home phone service from Bell to Teksavvy. I consider this to be a stop-gap plan, and in this case it is just Teksavvy reselling the Bell service. I already have a cell phone, and my ideal is to switch my wife to also using a cell phone from POTS service. With some of the new competitors in the cellphone marketplace, cell will be cheaper than POTS anyway. We already use portable phones -- and even with an Ottawa-only cell phone plan it will be more portable than our current phones.

I subscribe to Fido just prior to the 2004 federal election as I had many customers who had election related websites, and they wanted to be able to contact me. I wanted a plan that was cheap, focused on the urban areas I worked in, and wasn't from an incumbent phone or cable company. Unfortunately Fido was bought by Rogers later in 2004. With the new entrants, and my new Nexus One smartphone, I switched to WIND mobile and added a data plan earlier this month. I'm now off of the incumbent providers again, and this time with a fully unlocked (network and OS software) mobile device.

Now the last component to come up with a plan for is Television. I am looking for options.

We pay nearly $140/month currently. My first thought a while back was to take 1/3 of this and upgrade my Internet connection, and the other 2/3'rds to paying directly to content copyright holders. The problem is that as much as I look, I don't see a way to pay directly for the "Television" content that I want.

I could wait until the many months after a season is over and the show is available on DVD. There are many problems with this, beyond the fact that I'd be waiting nearly 2 years after everyone else to watch the first episode. DVD sales do not count towards ratings, and it is quite likely that by the time I have the option to watch the first episodes the show has already been cancelled (IE: Defying Gravity, Bionic Woman 2007, The Sarah Connor Chronicles). It seems that DVDs will remain a way to keep at home shows that I already watched elsewhere, and that I know I'm going to want to watch many times again (IE: I just ordered Doctor Who: The Complete 1st Season - DVD Boxed Set, and already have Firefly and the Dollhouse season 1. Still waiting for the Dollhouse season 2 DVD to finally be out).

There are some shows that are available on the websites of various broadcasters. While this is fine for me when watching sitcoms, I don't think my wife will appreciate the much lower quality video that is available on these sites. I also want better screen resolutions for watching my Science Fiction.

So, what am I left with?

I suspect I'm going to slowly cut my cable down regardless of whether I have a replacement. I am looking into a more advanced PVR that will be able to record the new over-the-air digital stations. I suspect if I get access to good scheduling that I will be able to record and watch later enough television to be satisfied. This too is short term, as I expect with advertising going online that over-the-air television won't have the budgets to show very interesting programming.

I know I can find enough video content legally online to keep me happy. Like many families this is a negotiation with other people, so I can't just drop Cable TV based only on my own viewing habits (or desire to change those habits).

Note: I know all the programming I want is available online if I just ignore Copyright. I'm not interested in this model for my home. While I have no problem not paying any money for programming due to "not for sale" problems created by copyright holders themselves, I'm not going to use infringement to bypass the fact that these copyright holders don't want my money. I will leave fixing television such that Canadians involved in the production can get paid to insiders like Denis McGrath who claims to be interested in such issues. Unfortunately, he seems more interested in the anonymous (AKA: generally useless) comments on Michael Geist's blog than on engaging with people who want to help Canadian creators get paid.

Science vs Science fiction

2010-05-19T13:13:00.000-04:00

Just tossing some ideas here, as I haven't solidified what I'm wanting to say. Please hit reply and join the discussion.

This morning I am trying to read a paper by Carys J. Craig which Michael Geist referenced on his blog.

Like many articles written by lawyers or journalists about "Digital Locks" or "technical measures" (TMs), it is a hard read as it seems to be talking about some science fiction Star Trek replicator stuff, while I am trying to map what they are talking about to real-world technology.

Whenever talking about communications technology I try to break what is being said into the 4 things (and potentially 4 different owners) from my Protecting property rights in a digital world talk.

I try to do the same thing when speaking with fellow creators-rights activists, such as what I wrote as comments on John Degen's blog on his article "weapons down, please".

Of the four things, they can each have locks put on them. The relevant questions to me are:

Who owns the thing that is locked
Who has the keys to the locks, and is it the owner or someone else.
Are there legitimate limits on the rights of owners.
What law protects the rights of the relevant owner, and what laws limit the rights of owners.

In those 4 things I believe Copyright has a legitimate roll when discussing the copyrighted content, and when discussing the software. Copyright clearly has limitations and exceptions which are there to not only benefit society as a whole, but also (and more often) to protect the interests of future creators building on the past.

I believe Copyright has no legitimate roll when discussing the physical media (if any), or when discussing devices. The ownership rights should be both protected and limited by provincial property law. In Canada I believe it should be clearly unconstitutional for the federal Copyright law to seek to limit (or in the case of non-owner locks on devices, effectively abolish) tangible property rights.

The paper by Mr. Craig has some interesting points relating to a reasonable interpretation of Article 11 of the WCT which reads:

Contracting Parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty or the Berne Convention and that restrict acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law.

Mr. Craig emphasised the phrase, "used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights". When I first read the WIPO treaties they didn't concern me. Of the 4 things it would mean that a TM applied by a copyright holder to their copyrighted work to protect the copyright related interests would be protected, and a TM applied by a software author to their software to protect the copyright interests of that software would be protected.

The flip side of that would be that TMs applied by someone other than the owner of the media would not be protected, and TMs applied by someone other than the owner of a device would not be protected. It also suggested that TMs applied by software authors that alleged to protect the interests of some separate copyrighted works would not be protected.

The problem is that it is TMs applied by other than the owners to things not related to copyright that are the source of a vast majority of the controversies we run into.

Technical Measures applied to media

With more and more content moving towards digital downloads and other 'communications by telecommunications', the various TMs applied to physical media will become less of a concern.

We will need to educate people about the loss of property rights that were applied to the physical medium once that physical medium no longer exists. As an example, there are many things you can do as the owner of book that can be denied from you as someone who acquired an e-book. An e-book is more analogous to software (with all its complex licensing agreements, limits, etc) than it is to a physical book. Simple question: How many books do you own that are more than 30 years old, and how much software do you run that is more than 30 years old (Note: software updates or new editions don't count). This is the world people adopting e-books are moving to.

I spent a lot of time in the 1980's helping people whose hardware was being damaged by TMs applied to physical media. In the 80's there wasn't the collusion between copyright holders and device manufacturers, so nearly all "copy control" was accomplished through deliberate media defects. In the case of Commodore games they actually put laser holes into the floppy disks such that when the disk drive read that part of the disk it would get random information. This allowed the software that was previously loaded to detect if the floppy was an original or a copy onto an undamaged floppy.

The key problem was that the 1541 drives would try to reset themselves when it noticed these defects. That reset involved bringing the disk head back to a reset position and literally banging against a piece of metal. That metal constantly needed to be adjusted, and in some cases became hit so often it was beyond repair.

As a service to some of our best customers we would give people a unprotected copy of the software when they bought the box. They were instructed to use the unprotected copy and leave the original as proof of purchase. Technically this unprotected copy was an infringing copy, but most of us in the business considered there to be no moral issue with this. In fact, most of us considered it immoral of the software author to cause physical damage to hardware in their failed attempt to reduce infringement.

I observed nearly 30 years ago what I still observe today: "copy control" or what is now called DRM drives more people to infringe copyright than it discourages from infringement. This type of technical measure reduces sales, not increases.

Technical measures applied to devices

I know it upsets some people, but I consider this to be a simple matter of basic respect for tangible property rights. I believe that if a device is locked it should be the owner that controls the keys. I believe it must be legally protected for an owner to remove a non-owner lock, and to apply their own lock if they so choose.

I don't care if some copyright holders want to experiment with new business models. I don't believe that any business model built upon a form of theft should be legalised or legally protected. We have laws against theft for a good reason, and I see no reason to turn our backs on hundreds of years of legal thought just because some people are confused when you add the word "digital" in front of something.

I believe proponents of non-owner locks fall into one of the following categories:

Immoral proponents of legalising theft
Amoral apologists who don't see theft as a problem
Dangerously inadequately informed people who don't understand the real-world technology enough to realise they are advocating/apologising for a form of theft

It is worth repeating that existing relationships fullfill all the legitimate needs of copyright holders. There are times when they want to offer content via a specific platform which they, or someone under contract with them, control. This can be accomplished simply by renting the relevant hardware, so that any TMs involved are there to protect the owner. I consider it extremely dishonest to claim that non-owner locks are required (and require legal protection) when existing rental arrangements could be used to avoid the conflict.

Technical measures applied to content

There are many legitimate uses of TMs by copyright holders, which we can discuss case by case if people wish.

One thing I don't consider to be legitimate is the use of TMs to encode content such that it is only interoperable with specific brands of end-user devices. Inevitably the only brands of devices these copyright holders "authorise" are those that have non-owner locks applied to them.

I consider those who apply non-owner locks to devices to be theives. I believe those who doesn't involve themself in the theft directly, but put people in a dangerous position, to have unclean hands.

In this case provincial property laws aren't the right place to deal with this conflict. I believe that federal competition law would be appropriate, and should prohibit the condition of a copyright license on the use of non-owner locked devices. If necessary, especially if we ratify the 1996 WIPO treaties, we may need to have clarification of this prohibition in the Copyright act for those who would not be aware of competition law.

Technical measures applied to software

This is similar to the content question, with additional limitations required. What we need to avoid is collusion between specific content copyright holders and specific software copyright holders to circumvent the balance of copyright, property or competition laws.

I believe the best book for understanding the roll of software as a regulatory force is still Lessig's Code: and other laws of cyberspace (v1 or v2). Since software has a regulatory aspect to it, there is a need to put additional limitations on software copyright holders that wouldn't apply to copyright holders of non-software works.

Nexus One unfortunately no longer sold directly from Google

2010-05-18T20:29:00.000-04:00

I consider it unfortunate that Google won't be selling the phone directly. I can understand other people wanting to go retail, but I didn't. I found using their online store quite convenient.

Official Google Blog: Nexus One changes in availability

I will see what Canadian retailers end up carrying the phone, and what I hope to be future versions of this phone.

How comfortable are you with reading ideas you disagree with?

2010-02-26T13:10:00.000-05:00

After posting a comment to the CBC Spark blog about an interview with Jaron Lanier, I looked up his book You are not a Gadget, and added it to my future reading list on eMusic.

I can tell from the CBC and other interviews that I'm not going to agree with this person on some pretty key things. Take what I've written publicly and what I think about the following quote:

Collectivists adore a computer operating system called LINUX, for instance, but it is really only one example of a descendant of a 1970s technology called UNIX. If it weren’t produced by a collective, there would be nothing remarkable about it at all.

Meanwhile, the truly remarkable designs that couldn’t have existed 30 years ago, like the iPhone, all come out of "closed" shops where individuals create something and polish it before it is released to the public. Collectivists confuse ideology with achievement.

In my mind, his first comment is like saying that democracy isn't remarkable because it is just a decision making mechanism just like Feudalism and other governance systems. I'm also entirely uninterested in the iPhone because it is closed, just as I wouldn't want to live in certain countries because of differences in political beliefs with the way it is governed. There are aspects of the structure of these societies that may be remarkably designed, and there is beauty everywhere in this world, but that doesn't mean I'm interested in living or even visiting there.

Wars have been fought against technologically superior people/countries that had incompatible ideologies, and I think far too many technologists confuse technology with achievement.

But that isn't the point for me. The point is that I'm curious to hear what this person has to say (hear in someone elses voice with the Audio Book, but close enough ;-) because I think I'm going to learn more from someone I disagree with than someone I agree with. I know I'll have moments where I'll be yelling at my mp3 player, but that is part of the process.

Thoughts?

Haiti and self-censorship.

2010-01-18T18:04:00.000-05:00

This morning I started to draft an article where I was going to start talking about how the identical hardware is transformed in whether it would have a positive or negative influence in our lives, and end with a question about our longer-term policies towards Haiti and whether our friendship there has overall been a positive or negative influence. The article was intended to be posted to either the IT World Canada or digital-copyright.ca blogs. I decided against that, given it may cause grief without benefit. Rather than tossing the article I decided to publish on this personal blog what I had as an early draft in case anyone wanted to pursue the line of thinking.

I fundamentally believe that for many of the worlds issues, whether that be poverty, food security, or building of infrastructure better able to withstand natural disasters, that knowledge sharing forms an important part. Trying to work against those who believe that making knowledge artificially scarce is good for society, as opposed to one narrow business model among other, will have some small impact on these problems. See: Sharing: the way to Make Poverty History.

---cut---

Lets use as a starting point something I suggested in my last blog entry. I have come to believe that the two most important questions to ask about any digital technology are: is the device locked, and who holds the keys. I then went on to suggest that I would see the identical hardware as either something to promote or something to strongly oppose based on the software and who hold the keys to any digital locks.

The important take-away is the message of Lawrence Lessig's book Code and other laws of Cyberspace, which is that software can be seen as a form of regulation -- of policy, and that we need to pay attention to this policy.

(Was intending to insert commentary about the UK digital agenda and how they plan to give away computers to citizens to allow them access to government and other services online, while at the same mandating the technology and network have foreign locks and monitoring/filtering through "copyright" reforms. I was then going to bring up my critique of the One Laptop Per Child project which I am no longer enthusiastic about since they fully support Microsoft's proprietary platform -- upon which a new generation of "pirates" will be deliberately manufactured through policy.)

This brings us to Haiti. While some may be offended by what I have to say, I believe that it is not earthquakes that kill people but buildings falling on people that kill people. We need to ask ourselves if the policy we have had towards Haiti helped or hindered the building of infrastructure that would have protected people from the earthquakes. Many reports have suggested that we knew about the instability of the plates many years ago, but like other science that doesn't give us an exact date (or an exact temperature, or...) the threat was ignored.

I am not going to detail what I think the policy of the Friends of Haiti (Countries such as Canada, France, United States, Venezuela) is, but to suggest that the policy is important. A quick Google search of US policy Haiti will give you a quick glimpse.

Irrefutable proof

2009-12-01T07:33:00.000-05:00

SlashDot has an article where Climate Change is yet again being debated.

Here is my contribution.

I hope you realise that you have made your own set of ASS-U-ME's that bias where you stand on this issue. You take some controversial ideas as axioms, and pick and choose which unknowns you will demand irrefutable proof of.

You said: "carbon taxes that would demolish the economy". I have seen no credible evidence to back up this type of claim. In fact, everything of credibility I have read over the decades suggests the opposite, which is that transferring taxes from some of the places it is now (such as income) onto emissions/pollution/etc would have a long term benefit to the economy. This has the ultimate effect of reducing these emissions, reducing the externalisation of these costs onto society (and thus governments) to clean up, and ultimately reduces taxation. I have been a supporter of what is called the "Green Tax Shift" for a much longer time than I have been aware of climate change.

You appears to have a "sky is falling" attitude towards this beneficial economic correction. Taking your own tone, I believe it is you that has to come up with 100% irrefutable evidence of your claim of economic harm before anything you say can be taken seriously.

Why copyright if climate change is so serious?

2009-11-29T12:35:00.001-05:00

I don't have a formal article to post, but I have some ideas I want to get out there to be discussed. Please respond to this post as my hope is to get a thread going, and to see what other people think.

I was at the OpenConcept 10'th anniversary on Friday, and one of the people I bumped into is Mike Kaulbars. He was Rina's TA back at Carleton, and I know him from PERC. He is someone who is now dedicating much of his time to climate change, and if you read or listen to him he is not optimistic.

While there are some who disagree with the scientists, I'm not one of them. I believe we are in a global experiment that we can't predict, and that will have dire consequences for our species. I don't personally think we are talking about extinction level event, but given how fragile our societies and economies are I expect disruptions far greater than anything we have ever seen in our past. It would be understating the issue to compare it to a world war as I believe it may include a world war as one of the geopolitical components.

Like many Canadians, I'm embarrassed with our participation. The news always includes articles such as Guardian: Scientists target Canada over climate change where prominent campaigners, politicians and scientists have called for Canada to be suspended from the Commonwealth over its climate change policies. I do not consider this to be a partisan issue given both the Liberals and Conservative parties who have governed federally are generally asleep at the wheel, with individual MPs and party members who are aware (Dion, etc) being the exception rather than a rule.

I believe that climate change and other environmental impacts should be seen as a form of debt that some economies have accumulated. This is why I subscribe to the idea that it is the economies that borrowed the most who should be the ones paying it down. This means that while I believe the majority-world countries (BRIC countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China) should be participants in global treaties, that their participation should be nearly entirely financed by the allegedly "richest" countries (IE: the ones that borrowed the most).

It would simply be wrong and unsustainable in my mind to suggest that countries who had borrowed the least should be denied the ability to develop their economies, while allowing the most indebted countries to remain allegedly "rich".

I say unsustainable as I believe if this nonsense is perpetuated that it will lead to escalating conflicts between the indebted countries and the rest of the world. The earlier steps will be at a level of trade which may decimate the indebted economies, and later stages involving warfare. I can't imagine the rest of the world allowing North Americans to continue to drive SUVs as we head into global food security issues without a few weapons (possibly including nukes given some of those countries are nuclear capable) being aimed at those SUVs.

There are a few ways to minimise this inevitable conflict. The simplest is for the debt repayment to be done nearly entirely financially. This would involved indebted countries paying large portions of their (likely declining) GDP towards not only their own emission reductions but the reductions of less indebted countries. For those silly people who thought that the Green Shift was going to impact the economy, this will have a far more profound impact -- as should be expected of those in massive debt.

Another less discussed, but critical part of the solution is knowledge transfer. Some of the emissions reductions will come from the use and improvement of more energy efficient technologies.

I am of the belief that part of the debt needs to be paid in the form of nullifying some exclusive rights that would otherwise have royalties going to the most indebted counties (Not coincidentally over 50% of worldwide royalties flow into the United States). Majority-world countries should be able to (without permission or payment) implement and improve on any technology which would either directly reduce their emissions, or indirectly help them in further technological development (IE: information and communications technology).

This would mean to me that while art and entertainment could be royalty bearing (for those who chose that method of compensation), that scientific, medical and technological knowledge would not require permission or payment to the most indebted nations (their citizens, their corporations). This would include no longer taking seriously any request from the less critical parts of the economy (IE: arts and entertainment) trying to dictate features or access to these more critical developments. This would include, but not be limited to, making the two locks of DRM illegal rather than legally protected. It would also include rejecting any law that might threaten someone's access to information technology simply because of the de-minimus offence of not paying entertainment industry fees (3-strikes and other such hypocritical nonsense).

This type of mandate would be consistent with how some of these most indebted nations became allegedly "rich". The United States did not honour foreign copyright until relatively recently, allowing their domestic publishing industry to be built first.

I feel that once countries representing a majority of the worlds population have royalty-free access to the knowledge of the most indebted countries that it will simply make good economic sense for those indebted countries to adopt peer production techniques for their own knowledge development in these scientific and technical areas. It would make no sense to stick with an outdated property-based incentive system inside western countries while the rest of the world moves forward even faster using peer production.

A gradual change in geopolitics has ties to why ACTA (the Orwellian double-speak labelled Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) exists at all. The policy thinking is the same as the 1995 National Information Infrastructure: new technology threatens older business models, so the new technology should be crippled. NII failed within the USA, so the special interest groups (which includes USTR/USPTO which are under regulatory capture) took the policy to WIPO which came out with the so-called "Internet" treaties in 1996. Fast forward to today when the majority world countries have recognised that WIPO should be working for them and this same type of backward-facing policy is no longer able to be pushed through WIPO. The special interest groups then move to bypass WIPO and create yet another institution to push their backward policy, which is ACTA.

Put in the context of the rest of this article it is obvious that I believe this thinking is backwards.

First is that while I believe that some specific intermediaries are being made redundant by new technology, that these changes overall benefit individual artists and entertainers more than it hurts. It does represent a change, but an insignificant change for our storytellers compared to the larger changes they have already gone through (IE: the advent of the technology to record audio and video, or print books), and even less significant than the changes society as a whole will be going through as a result of changes in the natural world.

The second is that even if I could be convinced that new communications technology would wipe out commercial arts and entertainment that I would consider it a small price to pay. We need to act globally to solve some pretty critical global problems, and it is inconceivable to me that we would reduce the effectiveness of and access to communications technology simply to allow commercial entertainment to exist.

Short-term we need to push politicians to abandon the dishonesty of ACTA, instead focusing on quickly modernising WIPO to fulfil its mandate as a UN special agency. If WIPO can't be made to fulfil this mandate then it should be replaced with a new agency that is able to, and disband WIPO. This agency would become the appropriate agency to move forward on exclusive rights policy that is consistent with health and climate necessities, which would be a major expansion of the works already done under the title of Development Agenda.

Thoughts?

Taranova Timeshare...scam?

2009-10-29T16:49:00.000-04:00

I'm trying to figure this out for a couple I know where the husband died. The husband bought a Taranova timeshare that finishes in the 2040's, which would have made the couple over a hundred years old. The widow didn't have any interest in the timeshare.

The whole thing reads like a scam to me as there doesn't seem to be any easy way out, and they continue to demand fees of the widow. Is anyone more familiar with what these things are, why anyone would ever want one, and how a widow could get out of it?

Google, Android 2.0 sticks fork in GPS devices?

2009-10-28T13:51:00.000-04:00

Interesting that ZDNet Larry Dignan is suggesting that Android phones will mark the end of traditional GPS devices. Android is a mobile operating system, and I don't see why traditional GPS hardware can't eventually become Android devices without the phone.

I guess I see value in separating the hardware feature of a wide variety of devices we may want from a more open operating system that could run on this hardware.

I was thinking of purchasing a Neo FreeRunner phone running Openmoko instead of a GPS device, and depending on when I decide to purchase I may end up with an phone (with GPS, media playing capabilities, etc) running Android as a different option.

There's a Google API for that...err..soon.

2009-10-27T13:16:00.000-04:00

I have a small project that keeps dragging me deeper into Google API's which seem like they will do what I want, but not quite yet. The latest was to find Google Apps Script, only to find out the preview has ended. I've asked when this will be available (See also: BLOG posting) for http://spreadsheets.google.com , and haven't yet seen any replies.

Here is the scenario. The final output is a Google map that will show up on a website. That part of the Google Maps API I seem to have figured out.

As inputs there is a Google Map that has farms, restaurants, and other locations pinpointed and labeled with a ID. That ID corresponds to a row of information that is currently held in a spreadsheet. What I want to do is mash together the Map information (KML output from Google Maps) with the spreadsheet information such that I have lat and long columns filled in.

It is trivial to upload this spreadsheet to Google Docs, and the person maintaining the information has already done this to allow for easier sharing.

Google Apps Script seemed ideal as it would run without anything special hosted elsewhere (IE: it is JavaScript running on Google). It would would have the ability to not only read and manipulate a Google Spreadsheet, but also to be able to source information from elsewhere (IE: the Google Map XML) as part of the manipulation. If only this API were available.

The next best would be if I could use Spreadsheets Gadgets, but everything I've seen suggests that this API only allows read-only access to the spreadsheet. The intended audience seems to be people doing output visualizations. This will be helpful in the project in other ways (IE: for outputting an XML file to be used as input for our Google Maps application), but not at all helpful for this aspect.

It seems that I'll have to go with an application that runs elsewhere using the Google Spreadsheets Data API, or just do this the old fashioned way of importing the spreadsheet data (via CVS) into MySQL to be manipulated that way. This isn't convenient in this situation as it would be best if the application didn't need to be hosted elsewhere, and eithor ran internal to Google (Google Apps Script) or ran in the browser (Google Gadget).

If anyone reading this has any alternative suggestions, please post in the comments.

Thanks.

Nortel Graffiti

2009-01-29T15:22:00.000-05:00

My current contract has me working in the Skyline Campus in Ottawa. This 8 building complex was purchased by PWGSC back in 2003 when it was still occupied by Nortel. It is now occupied by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) and Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA).

This is the end of my first week at this new location, and more AAFC people are moving into this campus all the time. It seems that not everything was cleaned up from when Nortel was here. On the 2'nd floor mens room there is graffiti which is clearly left over from Nortel.

Some things seen on the walls of the stalls:

"How the " (not to be blogged) "does Nortel expect me to feed my kids"
"nolonger@nortelnetworks.com ---> welfare.org"

An irony for those who know some of the mistakes that Nortel made that meant that they are in the hard times they are now: all the desks and conference rooms (and so-on) in this complex have Cisco IP phones.

Letter to CBC and Clive Doucet about OCTranspo drivers strike

2009-01-14T07:38:00.000-05:00

The following was sent yesterday morning to CBC Morning and to my councillor Clive Doucet. I think we need to fire any councillors that still support Mr. O'Brien in this issue.

I was appalled to hear on the radio this morning that Mr. O'Brien has injected himself as the sole representative of city council on this issue. I could say like some callers that I am "done" with Mr. O'Brien, but I was never with him in the first place. The only reason he is mayor is because we still use the antiquated First Past the Post electoral system. He was not the first choice of the majority of Ottawa voters, and if we used a modern ranked ballot voting system we would quickly have realized he wasn't their second or third choice either.

I believe it is overdue for city council to put in a better representative, or speak individually as representatives of their constituents. We don't elect the Union, and they are only intended to represent the drivers. Councillors are our only representatives in this important issue, and should be representing both current residents and future residents (IE: environmental deficits increased by this strike).

Linux video issues: boxing day punishment

2009-01-12T20:40:00.000-05:00

I seem to have run into a number of problems with my video. I figured someone reading this might be able to offer some help, and getting some frustration off my mind might make me more calm.

I broke a personal rule this year: I participated in boxing day shopping. The Samsung SyncMaster T220 LCD monitor was on sale for $200. Since I wanted to stop using my old tube monitors to save electricity, I figured this would be a good time to do this and I bought two (one for my desktop, one for my wife Rina).

Took them home, plugged one into Rina's computer and it just worked right away. We set the resolution to a lower-than-maximum which was more to Rina's liking (1024x768). This computer is using the S3 Savage video built onto the motherboard (Chip: id 8d04, "ProSavage DDR-K"). It runs Ubuntu with xorg autodetecting everything based on a bare-minimum xorg.conf.

I plugged the other one into my computer and the screen simply displayed “Not optimum mode. Recommended mode: 1680x1050 60Hz”. Using system-config-display running from the console it could detect my card (Matrox G450 - Chipset: "mgag400", 16M Video RAM) and the monitor, but would never give a display mode that would work with the monitor.

I figured I would buy a new video card that would not only drive the monitor, but hopefully be accelerated so I could get those cool windowing effects/etc. I ordered an ASUS (Well, ATI) AH3450 card which was mentioned as supported by the radeon driver (It's listed in the "radon" man page).

This turned out to not work out well. While the card worked, it didn't seem to work for accelerated graphics at all. In fact, video seemed much slower than with the G450 card even when set to the same screen resolution.

I decided to experiment with the proprietary driver, just to see how this would work. The fglrx driver is bundled by rpmfusion, which I already use for a few video codecs/etc. This turned out as I expected given how well I find proprietary software to work: the driver was unstable and I didn't know when booting the system whether it was going to freeze up or not. I also saw a lot of odd flickering artifacts on the screen (Note: I did test this monitor with Rina's computer to see if the monitor was broken, and it is fine), which made it realistically unusable. The card also has audio for the SDMI interface and this seemed to kill my existing SB Live audio (IE: new audio device showed up, but my SB Live was gone. USB headset still worked).

I made an additional mistake: I figured that maybe the problem was outdated software, so I upgraded my Fedora Core 9 computer to Fedora Core 10. After I upgraded all the things that were still out-of-date after that badly done upgrade, I noticed no improvement with the radeon card.

I put the G450 back in the machine. Rather than restoring me to the previous working state, now my X video extensions are broken. I can run vlc and mplayer with slow video using the 'x11' video output driver (IE: `mplayer -vo x11 *.mp4` ), but 'xv' (IE: `mplayer -vo xv *.mp4` ) just shows me a blue window where my video would normally have been.

I seem to now have brought my computer to a state where video is broken with my G450 and tube monitor, as well as the Radeon and LCD monitor.

Any suggestions to try next would be appreciated.

Happy new year?

2008-12-31T22:41:00.000-05:00

It is traditional to wish everyone a happy new year on new years eve. It is also traditional to discuss the good and bad things from the past year, and our hopes for the future. As the year ends I find I'm thinking about some disturbing things.

On December 4'th we saw the federal House of Commons prorogue. This was a sneaky procedural trick used by the prime minister in order to avoid (or delay) a coalition replacing his government. This event was the period in my mind to a sentence of events I had been observing. The fact that a massive number of Canadians thought that this procedural trick was appropriate reminded me of just how messed up we are as Canadians. Beyond Canada, similar trends around the world demonstrate how our lack of understanding of our current situation appears to make us incapable of making positive changes towards the future.

While there are many issues I wish to discuss, our governments are a critical decision making body. We need to understand how we make decisions before we can encourage good decisions on other issues to be made.

Political Crisis

Canada uses the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy. Unlike the United States where US citizens elect (indirectly through an Electoral College) a President , Canadians do not elect a prime minister. Canadians do not even directly elect a government. What they do is vote for candidates in their own electoral district (or riding) which are then elected to represent them in the parliament. These parliamentarians then come together to form a government and the opposition. Candidates are most often nominated by parties, and run under a party banner, which indicates to voters which group of fellow parliamentarians they will support to form the government.

I'll state this another way. A total of 13,832,972 votes were cast nationally of the 23,401,064 registered electors, Elections Canada figures showed as of 9 a.m. ET Wednesday October 15, 2008 . Of these, 38,548 were cast for Steven Harper. That is 0.28% of votes cast, or 0.16% of registered voters. Steven Harper became Prime Minister after the election this year not because he personally received the majority of votes in some election between Prime Ministers candidates, but because it was believed that as the leader of the party that won the most number of seats that his party would enjoy the confidence of the majority of elected representatives to the house of commons.

As of the moment, there are 143 members of the Conservative caucus, 77 Liberals, 49 Bloc, 37 NDP and 2 independents. I say "as of this moment" because our elected representatives are able to switch party affiliations, be kicked out of their caucus, or other such things. We elect representatives of constituencies to the house of commons, not people who are mandatory members of any party.

The above means that the conservatives have 46% of the 308 seats in the house of commons. This does not make them a majority, and they need 154 (or 11 more) votes to pass any legislation. In order for another configuration to form the government they would need to get the support of all 3 parties, given the Conservatives seemed unlikely to form a majority coalition with any one of the other parties.

A cautious government, recognizing this fact of their being a minority government and only needing the support of one additional party to pass legislation, could very easily maintain this confidence. All they need to do is work together with another party to get legislation passed. It didn't need to be the same party every time, they only needed to avoid issues that would somehow get all 3 opposition parties together to form a majority against the minority Conservatives.

This is why the Economic Statement was so baffling for those of us who understood how the Canadian parliamentary system works. It took aim at a few key policy areas which the Conservatives knew could not be supported by the opposition parties. By giving what needs to be recognized as an aggressive ideological partisan economic update, they ensured what should have been seen as a long-shot: the bringing together of the opposition parties to propose an alternative configuration of the house of commons that would enjoy the confidence of the house.

It doesn't matter what you personally believe about the specific controversial issues they brought forward. On some of these issues I agree with the Conservatives, and some with the majority opposition. The only thing that matters is that it was trivial to know that all opposition parties would be strongly opposed to these measures.

Economic Stimulus: The Conservatives spoke about their existing tax cuts, including the GST cut and cuts in government spending, as an economic stimulus. While this is an honest belief of some conservative policy makers, less ideological/partisan economists disagree with this characterization. With most people recognizing we were heading into an economic crisis that was being compared to the great depression, it would be impossible for the opposition parties to let this level of disagreement slide by. In fact, many economists believe that governments fallowing this type of thinking is what allowed a stock market crash that would have been a recession in the real economy into the great depression. (Note: I'm currently listening to The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 by Paul Krugman)
Campaign finance reform: The economic update announced that "our Government is eliminating the $1.95-per-vote taxpayer subsidy for politicians and their parties, effective April 1, 2009." Canadians need to know where this subsidy came from, which is as a replacement of donations from corporations and unions. Most democracies have been fighting trying to get the influence of money out of politics, with Canada's move being seen as a critically important one. The alternative being the corruption that comes from politicians bought from well financed special interest groups.

This is also an issue seen as clearly partisan, with the Conservatives being the party most successful in replacing corporate/union donations with individual donations. This was seen to be a fiscal form of Gerrymandering.
Right to strike: The speech announced, "The legislation would also temporarily suspend the right to strike through 2010–11". Again, no matter how we may feel about public sector strikes being different than private sector strikes, this is a statement that is trivial to realize the opposition majority would reject.
Pay Equity: The speech announced, "Another issue we intend to address is the litigious, adversarial, and complaints-based approach to pay equity." ... "We are introducing legislation to make pay equity an integral part of collective bargaining." Ditto above: we may agree or disagree, but the opposition parties clearly could not agree.

What offended me the most is what happened next. Instead of acknowledging their mistake, Conservative partisans started to abuse Canadians lack of understanding of our parliamentary representative democracy.

They claimed that the coalition of opposition parties lacked legitimacy, even though it had more legitimacy at that moment than the Conservative government did. They claimed that the Liberals and NDP were making some sort of "deal with the devil", even though it was clear that the only way that the Bloc would have influence in a Liberal/NDP government is when they were voting with the Conservatives (IE: only when the Conservatives and Bloc were in agreement would they together out-vote the Liberal/NDP coalition). Like the Conservatives, the Liberal/NDP coalition only needed the support of one other party, in this case the Conservatives or Bloc, to pass legislation.

This appeared to me to indicate the Conservatives had become so focused on retaining power that they were willing to risk everything to keep it. They were instigating a Canadian unity crisis far greater than anything threatened by Quebec separatists.

Housing Crisis

I find it telling that the 2008 crisis was first called the housing crisis. This was in reference to the sub-prime mortgage issue where people were being convinced to purchase homes that they could not afford, and where this bad debt was being deliberately hidden through derivatives. There is also a deeper meaning.

The root word 'eco' is derived from the Greek word "oikos", meaning house. Ecology is the study or the relationship between organisms and the environment (study of our home), and economy is the management of that home.

We do have a housing crisis, but while so many people are focused on trying to protect legacy and harmful management practises from change (the "economy"), they are forgetting the far more important crisis in the health of our relationship to the home itself (ecology, environment).

I say harmful management practises because I reject the validity of the current management style that dominates western economies, and that are being aggressively exported by these economies worldwide. Any economic system that pushes the most important questions into "externalities" can not be considered a valid system for managing these important questions. When the long-term or even short-term health and sustainability of the household is not a factor in the management style, then that management style must be replaced. It is long past time that we internalized critical externalities.

It was frustrating to watch the debate during the last election on the carbon tax. The Green Tax Shift is a well understood method of internalizing critical externalities into day-to-day economic decisions: by ensuring that the price of some goods include more of the actual costs. It was frustrating to watch people who claim to support free market economics to be willing to provide that "invisible hand" adequate information to make the decisions such a system would otherwise be able to make. Taking their lead from a big-government managed economy mindset, the Conservatives actively opposed markets having this information and instead proposed big-government solutions over market solutions.

In this important question, the Liberals don't fair much better. Governing by the polls rather than by good decision making practises, they ignore everything until such time as the general public noticed the issue again. They did nothing of substance between the years when Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was in office when they were replaced by Harper. In April 2006, Mulroney was recognized by the Sierra Club as Canada’s Greenest Prime Minister. Where the Harper Conservatives actively oppose modernization of our economy, the Chretien and Martin Liberals didn't bother to do anything.

I agree with David Suzuki on the basic questions around the importance of the economy compared to ecology. He gave a great speech on October 30th, 2008, in Ottawa at the 20th anniversary of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE). We invented the "economy", which I translate to devising a specific management style. Modernizing the economy to properly manage our relationship with our home (ecology) is as simple as changing management style, and yet politics have somehow elevated a narrow management style to being considered more important than everything: including the very thing we are managing.

Gaylord Nelson said it in another way: "The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around."

And yet, our politicians are "bailing out" specific management styles in a way that will increase both our fiscal debt (to be paid by future generations of taxpayers) and our ecological debt (to be paid by our children, assuming many will live at all). In an article penned by David Suzuki and Faisal Moola (widely republished) they indicated that we could solve our real housing crisis (the ecological one) with that money, and yet we seem to be headed the opposite direction.

Environmental issues often come down to a political division between "Industrialized" nations (representing the most industrialized) and "majority world" nations (representing the majority of the worlds population who are predominantly poor under our current economic/management style). The key issues come down to over-consumption, a problem largely in industrialized nations, and over-population, a problem largely in "majority world" nations. At global environmental conferences you have rich industrialized nations not wanting to have the consumer society on the agenda, and poor majority world countries not wanting population on the agenda. What ends up happening is that both end up off the agenda, making it nearly impossible for us to work towards solutions.

Like many things when you get out of the labs or classrooms and into the real world, these issues are linked. Studies have indicated that poor people tend to have more children. In many cultures it is believed that having children is the only way to ensure ones own survival when there is no safety nets outside of family. This leads many studies to suggest that ending poverty is a critical tool in reducing population growth. The obvious problem is that if new-found wealth is used to join the consumer society, it will only exasperate the hyper-consumption problem.

On the flip side is a simple moral question: why should poor people reduce their population (IE: have fewer children, etc) in order to leave more planetary resources for rich people to own more "things"? Are those of us in rich nations really that selfish as to believe that being able to own our own car and travel large distances in order to live in the suburbs is a valid tradeoff to the birth and health of children?

The reality is that most people don't make these connections. They think of their own lives in isolation of the impact their choices may make on other people. We need to somehow move out of this tunnel-vision thinking and think more worldly, as our survival as a species depends on us being able to be smart enough to change our management style soon enough to save our home.

Climate Change?

It was clear to me from political discussions around the Green Tax Shift during the previous election that there are still many climate change skeptics and deniers. There was a time when I was curious about their way of thinking, but I've become a bit bored of it and want to move onward.

The basic problem with the debate is that these people wish to promote as science what is actually a political debate around different decision making methods and who has the burden of proof.

They want there to be irrefutable scientific evidence before any decision is made, knowing full well that science can't produce irrefutable evidence. In the case of climate science there isn't the possibility of observing a global phenomena on some other globe and then writing down observations and conclusions. We only have access to this single globe at the moment, and do not have the ability to follow a few different hypothesis to observe the different possible outcomes. We have to rely on models which can never be perfect, but are the best that we have.

I will be honest and state that my own thinking took the available science and then made a logical political decision. I won't bore people with going through my entire thinking process, but I will use a "worst case scenario" as an illustration (Recognizing the flaws in this as a rhetorical device)

Suppose the current understanding of climate by the majority of climate science is wrong, and we over-compensate for this potential problem. The worst case scenario is that we move to quickly to different management styles (economic models) which are more efficient and thus more sustainable. Most of the changes we would make to compensate for climate change would benefit society in other areas having nothing to do with climate change.

Suppose the current understanding is correct and we under-compensate for this potential problem. It could result in the extinction of our species, and much of the other life on this planet.

While there will always be climate change deniers, engaging in a debate with them seems as exciting and useful to me as a global conference of bureaucrats debating how many angels we could fit on the head of a pin. I may be politically correct and pretend I care in polite company at a social event, or I might just be honest and tell them how worthwhile their words are to me.

In my mind we need to modernize our economic systems. When we are making good management decisions we can take the leisure time to pursue through models the theories of a minority of climate scientists about what the outcome could have been had we continued with a bad management style.

Public Transit in Ottawa

To move from the global to the local for the moment, I have been thinking about the current transit strike. It has an impact on me personally, but I think more about the larger impacts it has.

As an environmentalist (IE: someone who tries to understand our current relationship to the planet, and advocate for changes in our management style so we can survive and thrive as a species in the future) I have always been a strong advocate of more efficient public transit. Even with electric cars, which would be a massive improvement over the status-quo, I do not believe that privatized transportation will ever give us the efficiencies we need to move the large populations we have around in a sustainable way. One of the things I hear all the time from motorists who refuse to use public transit is the dependency question, and how there are transit strikes which they don't want to be harmed by.

Are the drivers or the city taking this impact into consideration? Do any of them care beyond their own selfish special interests?

Public sector strikes really are different than private sector strikes, in that the public sector is often offering a service that is a natural monopoly. This means that there is no competitor that people can switch to that is the threat that both management and labour have to deal with. With the public sector any strike is also inherently political, and has implications far beyond the comparatively minor labour issues.

I remember talking to a few Ottawa bus driver back in in 1997 when Ontario teachers were out of work to protest the education funding bill 160. These drivers believed that teachers should be legislated back to work, and they were complaining how they had to find "babysitting" services for their children. In this case the teachers were protesting a bill that would (and has) harmed public education in Ontario. On the other hand, I know of no instance of bus drivers in a work stopage in order to protest to protect public transit. Couple with that the fact that the impact to the city of transit work stopage is far greater than of teacher work stopage, and you can see why I've had a hard time having any sympathy for bus drivers for more than a decade.

While I don't back the current mayor and city government who generally don't seem to care about the impacts (some say they are "saving money" during this strike), I have even less support for the drivers. I've already written my Ontario MPP (Premier Dalton McGuinty) and Federal MP (David McGuinty) to ask that they step in and put this strike to an end. I believe that part of the settlement should be that a minimum of double the money "saved" by the city should be required as new investments in public transit. I think it is simply wrong for those politicians not all that supportive of public transit to begin with to receive a windfall from this strike.

Cognitive Surplus

People who know me in recent years will be surprised that I did this much writing without talking about copyright. It is the topic I've spent the most time reading, listening, thinking. talking and writing about in the past 7 years. As with everything else, I believe it is all connected. Whether it is changing management styles (economic models) to reduce consumption or poverty/population growth, how we treat knowledge itself in any future economy is critical.

While I have learned a lot in the last 7 years, I keep asking some of the same questions. In 2001 I asked whether knowledge represented A new economy, or a new product for the old economy? If we treat knowledge as a new product for the old economy, focusing on buying and selling knowledge as if it shared traits of tangible goods, then we can never harness the ways in which knowledge is fundamentally different. This new product will be added to the existing failing management style (economy), with unique ways in which this treatment will make the problems worse (See: C-61 Fails Green Copyright Test)

There is little improvement I could make on the nature of knowledge over what Thomas Jefferson said in 1813.

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it.

Where nature creates a natural rivalry for tangible goods, requiring some system to manage that rivalry with property being one option, it is only law that creates an artificial scarcity and rivalry for non-rivalrous knowledge. As well as the economic inefficiencies of treating knowledge as property, I believe there are obvious social implications: the only way to fully enforce such an artificial scarcity against nature itself will ultimately result in a totalitarian state.

If instead we provided just enough exclusivity to provide adequate incentives, and no more, we have the possibility of harnessing the unique nature of knowledge. The production and distribution of knowledge may happen in private sector firms, but unlike the required capital investment for manufacturing of tangible goods does not need to be limited to that organizational structure. I believe knowledge production and distribution will happen best when all sectors of the economy are able to be adequately harnessed.

As one example of the power of what can be done as part of the voluntary sector, listen to the full Interview of Clay Shirky on what he calls the "cognitive surplus" (rebroadcast December 24).

How to get to my Dream Job from here?

2008-11-27T17:16:00.000-05:00

I was just listening to episode 55 of Spark on Work 2.0. Like many of Nora's shows, they seem to fit into bigger things that I'm thinking about. It turns out that I've already been thinking about my own changing work situation.

(Note: This is being posted to blogger as I haven't yet set up a blog that is truly intended to be 'personal')

First, some background. While I was still in University I kept bumping into people who thought they wanted to hire me. I kept having the same problem: I didn't find I agreed with the choices of my employer, including things that they did and/or that they asked me to do that I felt was unethical. After going through a series of jobs where I quit based on disagreements with my employer (and them trying to give me a raise as a "solution" to the problem), I chose to become self-employed in 1995.

As my own boss I could pick and choose my clients and hopefully have a good match. I ended up working largely NGO's (Non-Governmental Organizations) doing broader work that I agreed with, or small projects for government or the corporate private sector.

While I find that I don't run into ethical problems, I don't find that I'm challenged in the projects that I've been doing. Most of the time I am doing simple system administration work that is something I know how to do, but I'm not really learning new things or doing any of the bigger thinking that I find far more interesting.

Nora ended talking about people wanting to live out their dream job or jobs. For me I believe that would be some job where I would mix both my technical background and my passion for global public policy issues. While I haven't been able to make much money (tiny contract here and there) on policy work, this is something I find far more exciting than system administration. Ideal would be something that would allow me to travel, and to be learning and sharing new ideas with people around the globe. It is one thing to do policy work online and collaborate with people, but there is so much more that can happen when you build deeper relationships in the real-world.

I just started a contract at the beginning of the month that may be a step in the right direction. It was something casually mentioned in the GOSLING mailing list, that someone was looking for someone with system administration experience with Linux and a few other software environments. I didn't have familiarity with them, but I did with some. So I decided to apply for the job, letting everyone know up-front what I did and didn't know.

The project is the National Land and Water Information Service (NLWIS). This group develops geographic information system (GIS) applications to access agricultural and environmental information to help Canadians make responsible land-use decisions.

I was hired as part of the team of people that do configuration management, and take fully developed and tested applications and deploy them on already configured software systems (IE: operating system level work already done). That may have been my job description, but I have very quickly been invited to participate in other troubleshooting within the project. I am now interacting daily with the developers, testers, database and network administrators as well as the person I'm partnered up with and my manager. It has been a great group of people to be working for, and I think I'm going to miss the environment when my contract ends at the end of March.

Working with this team has been going so well so far that it is giving me cause to re-think being self-employed. I think that with the right team of people to be working with, and with a fairly modern management style that allows me to help the larger team outside of the specific area I was hired for.

It is amusing, but the most frustrating aspect of my job relates to some of the traditional silos that sometimes form in large organizations. In this case it is not with any of the folks who are working in the same building, but the restricted access to the servers that the deployment team has been allowed by the system administrators. I'm used to being 'root' on the machines I work on for clients, in some cases the only person with root access for co-located hosted computers other than the ISP that owns the hardware.

This current contract does not, however, integrate both my technical skills and my public policy passion. It has thus far made better use of my technical skills than some of my clients in recent years, but I suspect that in the longer term I will want more.

A few years ago I was asked to become the policy coordinator for CLUE. This organization was previously known as the Canadian Linux Users Exchange, and it was intended to be a Canada-wide organization to facilitate communication between Linux Users Groups (LUGs). The executive decided to change the roll to becoming an Open Source association, expanding beyond the previous focus on "Linux" or on "Users" to including all Open Source (Not just Linux but also BSD, and not just Operating Systems but all Open Source) and businesses as well as users of Open Source.

While it was hoped that this could become a paying job, this didn't turn out as I had hoped. While I did this work as a volunteer (integrating it with my digital-copyright.ca and GOSLING Community volunteer work), I can't realistically be not making much money forever. This is one of the things that I felt needed change recently, and why I took on the NLWIS contract. As much as I believe digital copyright and FLOSS policy work is badly needed (and not being adequately done), I also need to help put food on the table and not be a dependant of my wife. I'm finding that when I come home from a days work a NLWIS that I'm more interested in "quality of life" activities (just hanging out with Rina, visiting 14+ month old Erin and Owen, visiting with other friends/family, etc) than in policy volunteer work.

Some friends have suggested that I set up a Paypal account and ask people to make donations toward allowing me to do more policy work. I'm not sure there would be any interest in that, and people would tend to want to pay for specific outcomes which is far harder to accomplish in policy work (or other social sciences where work is hard and outcomes aren't as easily measurable). I suspect that unless there is an association backing up the work, where that infrastructure offers the accountability and transparency for donors, there won't be much interest.

I am open to ideas to go from where I am today to that "dream job" that Nora spoke about.

2008-10-18T15:53:00.001-04:00

This isn't really my BLOG, at least not at this time. I do most of my blogging on the Digital Copyright Canada site.

This is here because it turns out that Google has enabled Blogger to be an OpenID server, allowing me to use my Google account to log into any OpenID enabled site and not have to remember some site specific password.

Maybe I will use this more in the future. In the interim, please see my personal home page for more of what I'm up to.