What Bill C-10 is really about.

The letter to the editor I sent to the Hill times was too long, so Kate Malloy (Editor) did her magic and published:

• We need to move ‘broadcasting’ and ‘copyright’ from Canadian Heritage, to Innovation, Science and Economic Development: McOrmond

 

The following is the unedited version with hyperlinks added.

---

I've been active in related areas of policy since the 1990's, so have watched the damage caused by the Department of Canadian Heritage (created in 1993 and given royal assent in 1995). This is a department whose Minister was granted jurisdiction over "Canadian identity and values, cultural development, heritage and areas of natural or historical significance to the nation" (from 4(1) of An Act to establish the Department of Canadian Heritage).

• Department of Canadian Heritage Act (S.C. 1995, c. 11)
  

The departmental mandate includes Official Colonial Languages. Given what I have finally learned since the start of 2020 about what the Governments of Canada continue to do to the Indigenous peoples of this homeland, this mandate has a very different meaning for me than it did previously.

• Brief to The Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs, for the study of the Subject Matter of Bill C-15
  

Two areas of technology law where that mandate is in conflict are Copyright and Broadcasting, but these were incorrectly included in 4(2) of the Act. These are areas of policy that should always have been the jurisdiction of the department currently called Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED), as transferred from the previous Department of Communications.

Sheila Copps set the tone as the first Minister of Canadian Heritage from 1996 through 2003. I met (and debated with her) in the context of Copyright law several times.


Ms. Copps saw intermediaries, such as broadcasters and collective societies, as proxies for creators. When discussing the 1996 WIPO treaties, and technological protection measures, she saw technology companies as one of those proxies. She believed that what was good for Apple, Amazon, Sony, Microsoft and Google would somehow be good for Canadian creators. It shouldn't be lost that the same Heritage thinkers claim to be so concerned with "Big Tech" given it was their flawed thinking which helped create that problem in the first place.

Ms. Copps and her Department of Canadian Heritage helped create a situation between Canadian creators and technology intermediaries that is not unlike Stockholm syndrome.

When the government of the day wouldn't provide an adequate budget for stable arts funding, Ms. Copps would create unaccountable and corrupt cross-subsidy schemes through the CRTC (Cable Production Fund, Canadian Television Fund, Canadian New Media Fund, Canadian Media Fund) and Copyright Board (Private Copying Levy, Access Copyright educational copying, and other compulsory or near-compulsory cross-subsidy schemes).

As technology changes, the department pushes to shift these cross-subsidy schemes into new sectors rather than finally recognizing the schemes were wrong from the beginning.


Once the tone was set, every Heritage minister since, Conservative or Liberal, and every Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage (CHPC), has followed her lead.

When I was very active in copyright with what a decade later was passed in 2012 as Bill C-11, I would closely follow what was said from MPs from the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology (INDU) committee and those from the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage (CHPC). It was my observation, including from meeting MPs in person, that the difference in views between an MP on INDU vs CHPC was far greater than the difference in views between a Conservative and NDP MP in the same committee.

During the 2019 review of the Copyright Act, INDU was forced to put out a press release reprimanding the CHPC for what for many people was yet another report from CHPC which read as if it were written by corporate lobbyists rather than a committee pretending to be concerned with the public interest.

• News release from the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology: On Shifting Paradigms
  

The same is regularly said of the CRTC, which largely acts as a lobbyist for specific corporations rather than regulating in the public interest.


So, what is Bill C-10 really about?

• C-10: An Act to amend the Broadcasting Act and to make related and consequential amendments to other Acts
  

In clause 1 it redefines "broadcasting" to include activities not related to broadcasting in order to yank jurisdiction away from ISED (INDU committee, and agencies such as the competition bureau, privacy commissioner, etc) toward Heritage and the CRTC.

It really is that simple. There is further discussion of cross-subsidy and other schemes, and some pennies to Indigenous languages and content to distract from the Heritage department's primary colonial mandate, but the core of the bill is a corrupt power grab between government departments and agencies.

While the Internet needs to be regulated, that regulation must be via a department and ministry, studied by a parliamentary committee, and managed by regulators that are looking at these issues from a lens that is the opposite of what Heritage and CRTC will offer.

• We need to remove "Broadcasting" and "Copyright" from the Department of Canadian Heritage, and move those areas of policy to ISED where they always should have been. Only then should the policy in Bill C-10 be revisited with the appropriate lens.
• We need to properly fund and empower the Competition Bureau, Privacy Commissioner, Consumer Affairs, and related agencies to handle a growing number of Internet issues.
• We need to complete the digital transition, not continue to regulate digital technology as if it were still analog. (See letter from March 1, 2021, copied below)
• We (including fellow creators) need more choice and competition in content distribution technologies, not less via central control.
• We need to disallow content distribution intermediaries from controlling technology which they don't own, such as was allowed/enforced in "Copyright" under "technological protection measures".
• We need creators to have more control over their own content distribution to maximize the benefits for themselves, rather than continuing to allow intermediaries to extract maximum benefits off the backs of creators.
• We need to empower audiences to make their own choices of what creativity they access. While we need to regulate situations where the sender is the content programmer (as was the case with analog-era broadcasting), we should never be regulating scenarios such as on-demand content libraries where it is the audience doing their own programming. (Discoverability is a Competition policy issue, not a Cultural policy issue)
• We must end unaccountable cross-subsidy schemes, especially never extracting money from services deemed essential during the pandemic to sectors which were not.
  

Russell McOrmond
Ottawa, Ont.
(The letter-writer is an internet consultant.)

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Feds should complete digital transition as part of its response to COVID

March 1, 2021


Re: “Bell Canada’s cuts were a shoddy way to treat people,” (The Hill Times, Feb. 10, by Andrew Caddell). I would like to point policy-makers to my May 2020 submission to the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology. In it, I suggested that the government complete the digital transition as part of its response to COVID.

The summary is that the pandemic demonstrated that communications infrastructure is an essential service. While having vertical integration was required by analog technology given you couldn’t put both telephone and television signals on the same wires, this is no longer the case with digital technology.

With digital technology the obvious way to manage the physical layer within municipalities is as a utility, where municipalities own and manage the infrastructure as they do with all other infrastructure. A competitive private sector can then offer services “over the top,” as happens with other infrastructure including roads. With an actual digital transition, we no longer need to have an exception for this communications utility.

While Bell Canada was necessary when we needed a dedicated analog telephone system, this time is long past. Any laws granting analog-era, private-sector privileges to right-of-way or wireless spectrum, including the Bell Canada Act, should be phased out as part of completing the digital transition.

• INDU Study: Canadian Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic
• Direct link to PDF of my brief.
• Text published on this blog: My telecommunications focused brief to INDU for Canadian response to COVID-19 pandemic
  

Russell McOrmond
Ottawa, Ont.
(The letter-writer is an internet consultant.)

My thoughts on the 2020 Speech from the colonial Throne

This afternoon, on unceded Anishinabe Algonquin territory currently the subject of treaty negotiation, a British colonial ceremony was held. With parliament only retaining British tradition, we were reminded by a "speech from the throne" that to this day the settler-state doesn't fully recognize the two groups who make up Canada: European colonialists/settlers and the peoples who had already been here for thousands of years.

As I read the text of the Speech from the Throne I noticed a few themes. I could easily put them under an overall headline of the continuation of narrowly harnessing European world views to attempt to further public policy goals.

• A  romanticization of over 150 years of the members of our European settler-state parliament dealing with challenges, with no recognition or harnessing of the experiences of the peoples who were already here for thousands of years.
• The continuation of the European entitlements vs responsibility world view around rights, which generate the wealth and power inequality at the heart of the gaps in social responsibility.
  
• A continuation of creating excessively large centralized entities which then need excessively large government regulatory and police interventions, rather than enacting policy to decentralize.

 

The speech properly recognized that we are in a series of crises, including not only COVID-19 but also climate change. There is also a crisis of legitimacy, where more Canadians are questioning the status-quo of how government has been operating.

Solving these problems requires far more change than postponing travel plans.  I believe it will require re-evaluating our world views, including abandoning the entitlement concept which allows individuals and groups to exploit resources (land, animals, people or ideas) to extract private benefit without any responsibility.  We need to think of rights as responsibilities we have to each other, not as entitlements we take from everyone and everything else.

 

Systemic racism is mentioned, but only in the unfortunately common "white" way of incorrectly believing that systemic racism relates to systems which include individual racists.  Systemic racism relates to the norms and practices within society or an organization. Good individuals can participate in systemic racism, as it is not about individual attitudes.

One large class of examples is the use of police forces as a top-down mechanism to ensure conformity to policies that deliberately avoid discussing the roots of the disputes that armed officers are thrown into. Those who are talking about defunding or abolishing the police are discussing changing our focus to solving societal problems at their roots.  This is not limited to the "war on drugs" or "war on mental illness", but many other government policy manufactured armed conflicts.

While claiming to recognize that Black Canadians and Indigenous Peoples are over-represented in the criminal justice system, the government had already stated it believed that criminal code amendments were needed for those who neglect seniors.  It is Canadian society, including the federal and provincial governments, that are neglecting seniors and yet through a "white" lens the solution is always seen to narrowly focus on criminalizing individuals.

I feel there is a similar problem with bringing up that it is unacceptable that any citizen be arbitrarily detained in relation to Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. The same is true of Meng Wanzhou being detained in Canada as a barely veiled part of trade and other disputes between the USA and China.

The RCMP has excessively close ties with a specific subset of foreign agencies and foreign political interests, and none of the above listed people would currently be detained if it were not for the hypocritical structural failures of the Canadian government.  The Five Eyes (FVEY) membership overlaps with the countries that opposed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States -- all British colonies, with the UK itself being the fifth member of FVEY). This should cause us to openly question what world views and values these agencies have in common.

The government can claim in a speech that this is something for which all Canadians stand united, but that doesn't make it true.

The backward-facing discussion of "Web giants" is another example of the government trying to hide its own policy failures.  Our communications infrastructure involves government granted monopolies in the form of right-of-way for physical wired infrastructure and spectrum allocation for wireless.  Phone companies were created by provincial and federal governments, and cable companies via municipal monopolies.  While this infrastructure exists as a matter of government policy, private interests were allowed to buy up all these monopolies such that only a handful of private sector companies claim exclusivity over most of the right-of-way and spectrum.  These companies then also bought most Canadian media that would be communicated over those wires and wireless, including television stations, radio stations and newspapers. (Note: Given their lobbying record, I consider CBC to be a Bell partner and not a public service)

When companies involved in physical entertainment distribution (Book/tape/CD/DVD sellers including Amazon, DVD rental by mail including Netflix) wanted to move existing distribution online, they were blocked by these vertically integrated monopolists. When possible Canadian online competitors to cable were formed, the monopolists blocked it (convincing parliament to pass targeted legislation against already existing iCraveTV and JumpTV). The same was true even of companies that offered search engine services that could be paid by advertising. These companies that could not get big enough were forced out of existence, and those who did were forced to move into the media creation and/or distribution business in order to be allowed to exist at all in a policy world controlled by analog-era media monopolists.

So the "Web giants" are a result of failed government policy around phone and cable companies, and compounding these failures can't possibly solve anything.

I have come to believe that the only solution to this problem is structural separation. The monopolies, whether for right-of-way or spectrum, should be returned to municipalities and managed as a utility in the same way as all other critical infrastructure is.  All over-the-top (OTT) services, including two-way voice (phone) and one-way simultaneous video (cable/etc), would compete on a level playing field and no longer be legally allowed to leverage government granted monopolies.

Taxing new media to perpetuate problems caused by old-media monopolists will only make existing problems worse. This will only increase the cost of those services for Canadians, when those services are providing far better value than the old-media monopolists.

Shitts Creek was able to break the Emmy's record for the most wins of a single reason of a comedy only after it was able to break free of CBC and get wider distribution internationally on services such as Netflix. While we should be providing more stable funding to Canadian production through accountable government subsidies (not anti-competitive old-media entitlements), that money and any other subsidies should be moved entirely away from legacy OTT media companies (broadcasters, and BDU's like cable companies).

Having a "Universal Broadband Fund" is also counterproductive when that money is handed over to old-media monopolists.  Necessary government support from the provincial and federal level should only be to municipalities building their own municipal infrastructure, and never to continue the harm of allowing private-sector monopolists to gain unaccountable control over that infrastructure.  It is the local communities, through their municipalities, that should be setting infrastructure priorities and not those priorities being set in the boardroom of some distant private sector monopolist.

I was happy to hear a renewed commitment to reverse almost a hundred years of Canada's opposition to the policies that became the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Canada needs to abandon its colonial period, and no longer side with Australia, New Zealand and United States as settler colonies of the United Kingdom.  We should instead be moving forward with decolonisation in order to become a republic. As a settler Canadian I do not support the continued implication that Canada was formed only by two sets of European colonists (French and English), and that these Europeans took over this land through conquest rather than being honorable with our existing treaty partners and within ongoing treaty negotiations.

Rethink: Inheritance, debt, and world views

At the end of June I joined a twitter thread started by George Soros where he referenced a short podcast essay he made about rethinking debt.

 

Inheritance is also a key part of systemic racism, allowing those whose wealth was gained off the (often whipped) backs of others to be perpetuated intergenerationally.

So much of failed economic policy is tied to counterproductive cultural entitlements.

— Russell McOrmond (@russellmcormond) June 30, 2020

 

While the thread was short, it touched upon some interesting ideas I wanted to expand upon.

Read outside your echo chamber

One person suggested that my comment came from within an echo chamber. In fact, what I wrote is what it sounds like when someone of European descent (ancestors primarily indigenous to Ireland) finally exits the Eurocentric echo chamber.

Persons of European descent often imply that economic discussions are linear thinking between the theories of two Europeans: Scottish Adam Smith (Capitalism, 1700's) and German Karl Marx (Communism, 1800's).  If you question anything about current implementations of Capitalism, the dominant European economic thinking in the 1900's and thus far in the 2000's, you are then "accused" of being communist. The idea that we might be expressing concepts from world views that originated from outside of Europe doesn't occur to them.

Due to events in Canada earlier in the year (pre-COVID) involving indigenous land protection groups, and events during COVID-19, I have embarked on my own antiracism training. While I have been questioning some small aspects of dominant European thought throughout my life, I now have a better understanding of where these ideas came from and where some of the alternatives came from.

Government Debt

George Soros ideas are simple, and involve different instruments for global or domestic government debt.

Built into the Bretton Woods institutions (International Monetary Fund and World Bank) is economic policies mirroring a European world view, and debt from these institutions pretty much always come with an imposition of European economic policy within the borrowing countries.

The idea that capital accumulation should be individual, but debt shared (through government, or otherwise externalised) is European thinking that I don't subscribe to.

Inheritance

I believe we have all heard the phrase "We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children". Some indigenous North Americans such as members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy subscribe to the Seventh Generation Principle where decisions we make today should taken into consideration and result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future.

For as long as I can remember I have thought the same thing about capital itself: that we don't inherit it from our parents, but borrow it from the future. Understood this way, inheritance is yet another form of shared (via the future) debt that exists only to benefit historical individuals. The future is claimed to "owe" the beneficiaries of this inheritance even if they make no contribution to society themselves.

There are levels of capital accumulation that are near a subsistence level that don't qualify as debt, where there is no issue with passing on to the same people you would normally be a caregiver for in life. This is the type of wealth transfer to descendants that most individuals will be personally familiar with, and is not what I'm referring to.

Individuals manipulating public policy to generate public debt

When we have individuals accumulating capital that could allow families or whole communities or countries to subsist for many generations without further contribution then this is public debt for personal gain.

I have never believed that those currently in the top 1% of capital extraction actually "earned" that wealth based on the value of their contributions to society. I believe they extracted that capital and created that public debt through flawed public policy (said in another way, corruption).

Rather than applauding these individuals, such as George Soros, Bill Gates, or Warran Buffet, I consider their building and abusing public debt to be immoral. While some of these individuals wish to direct some of this wealth and influence towards policy goals of their choosing, this doesn't change the fact that these individuals are manipulating public policy based on the public debt they have created.

If you take a close look at those declared the "richest" people in the world, you might notice something in common.  They were all able to accumulate this personal monetary wealth based on government granted and/or protected monopolies.

Cory Doctorow wrote a book-sized essay he titled "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism" where he discussed one aspect of government protected monopolies.  Rather than understanding that the mere existence of a monopoly is economic and political harm, western governments have transformed into believing that the only possible type of harm is "consumer pricing".

From this Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Larry Page (Google), Elon Musk (Tesla), Sergey Brin (Google) were able to build upon the decades of monopolist public policies actively promoted by Bill Gates (Microsoft, pharmaceuticals), Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison (Oracle), and others in more traditional media and communications.  These are individuals who helped expand government granted monopolies (right-of-way wired communication monopolies, wireless spectrum monopolies, author monopolies, inventor monopolies, etc) into something that enables a small number of individuals to accumulate personal benefit at the expense of society as a whole.

Much of the current attempts by western governments to regulate "Big Tech" are doomed to fail as they narrowly focus on the harm made blatantly visible by specific individual monopolists, rather than recognizing that flawed government policies entirely created the problem if the first place. They insist on rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic rather than bothering to steer clear of the iceberg.

North American indigenous world views

Whether we call it Turtle Island or North America, there were people here for thousands of years before Europeans visited this land in the 1400's. While early interactions were civil, this relatively quickly changed to colonization and in the southern part conquest (what the settlers declared themselves to be the United States). While the European settlers in the North (what Europeans declared to be Canada) weren't as overt in their conquest, the ongoing violation of treaties suggests us northerners weren't that much better.  The official policy of the government of Canada has essentially been genocide of indigenous treaty partners.

 

As I'm learning in the Indigenous Canada course I'm taking, North American Indigenous world views and governance are very different from European. While there are differences throughout North America as there are in Europe, commonalities exist:

• Philosophy of interconnectedness and belonging
• Unity through collaboration
• Relationship with the land extending to environmental stewardship

 
Rather than the European focus on the individual, often to the exclusion of the group, indigenous North Americans believed each person should have accountability to the group for their own actions and words.

Rather than competition which is seen by Europeans as how to create growth opportunities, collaboration is the focus.  Each child, youth, adult and elder must have a role and each retain a responsibility to each other and to the community.
 

The European concept of "purchasing" and then "owning" land was inconceivable, and thus the perspectives of Europeans and North Americans on agreements and treaties were quite different.  Europeans believed in a concept of ownership (exclusivity without responsibility) of land, animals, people and ideas which was not shared by others. Indigenous North Americans believed in stewardship, a view I personally share.

The welfare of fellow citizens

With a pre-European North American world view, policies such as a Universal Basic Income would be obvious. As we all have responsibilities to each other, there would no longer be this push to have complex (expensive to administer) programs that seek to negatively stigmatize sharing as happens with most social welfare and other programs in North America today.

In a country where we recognized responsibility for each other, we would no longer be willing to sustain policies which enable so few individuals to extract so much wealth from the commons or the future.  Policies which create and sustain monopolies would no longer be supportable.

Land stewardship could replace land ownership, with the building up of public debt (as we see in the energy sector) being replaced with sustainable land and resource usage.

If we also replaced coercive justice with restorative justice, much of the problems with over-policing and the disconnect between policing and the communities would no longer exist.

 

I will never claim to have all the answers, but the most critical thing I have learned thus far this year is we all need to exit the Eurocentric echo chamber.

Decolonisation

I am a strong supporter of decolonisation. In this I'm not only referring to racist language used as part of colonizers treating the colonized as inferior, but to also visit whether precolonial world views, governance and laws should be readopted in countries such as Canada.

As I look at how Europeans and their colonies have addressed various crisis from the current pandemic to the global climate crisis, I have come to believe that European economic thought from the 1700's and 1800's has failed our species. We need to steer in a different direction if we are to have a sustainable future.

 

Sep 30 addition:

While transcribed in 1980 and posted online in 2011, the following speech by Russell Means is helpful to understand.

Revolution and American Indians: “Marxism is as Alien to My Culture as Capitalism”

#DigiCanCon Comments on @shomicanada @whoismrrobot @GooglePlay TV , @HBOCanada @GameOfThrones

I've been a happy Netflix customer since 2011, dropped cable TV in 2012, and frequently purchase DVD's of movies or seasons of scripted TV programming. This year I've reviewed CraveTV,  CTV GO and Showcase's website, and decided to subscribe to Shomi to do a review.

As with other services offered by broadcaster or BDUs (cable companies) I didn't expect to be happy with Shomi.

What I (and a growing percentage of the market) want is to be able to conveniently watch the shows I want, at a location I want, at a time of my choosing, on devices of my choosing, and at a reasonable price.

What the broadcast industry wants to offer is programming of their choosing, at a time of their choosing, on devices of their choosing, and at the maximum price they believe the market will bear.  The digital transition for cable was several steps backward from analog where subscribers could choose their own brand of tuners to digital where the tuner brand is imposed.  They are not offering services based on sound market analysis as they claim that if anyone doesn't want to purchase their products and services the only reason could be they are "pirates".  This scapegoat is blocking them from offering services that their potential customer base actually wants, and the more "copyright" talk that blames audiences that happens the less likely the market can ever mature.

Shomi

As far as content is concerned, Shomi is similar to CraveTV in that it is older scripted TV programming that was broadcast much earlier.  I scanned the catalog and didn't see anything I could recognize as current seasons.  CraveTV and Space TV are both owned by Bell, and I wouldn't be surprised if exclusive licensing by Bell blocked the Shomi Partnership from licensing a larger catalog of Sci-Fi and Fantasy scripted TV. That said, there would still be shows I would watch if Shomi were going to be around longer.

Technology

Shomi's technology is far more advanced than CraveTV.  Unlike CraveTV where the website can't cast to a Chromecast using a recent Chrome browser, Shomi had no problems streaming directly from the website.  I have also downloaded the Shomi for phone to my Nexus 4 and Shomi for tablet to my ASUS Flip chromebook, and it works well on both devices watching on-screen and casting to my TV.

HDMI CEC is supported by the Shomi Chromecast application.  This may seem like a minor feature, but it is very important.  It allows for pausing and resuming of programming using the TV's remote control.  This avoids having to get the device that initiated the show opened - screen blanked so I need to log in, and a good chance you have to battle the app to get the pause to work.  By then the phone call/etc is over and you need to fight the interface to rewind.

Shomi always seems to remember which episode of a series I was on, and unlike CraveTV doesn't require that I search for the series to choose a different episode. The "Shomi later" bookmarking and "Recently watched" listings work well and allow you to easily see which episodes you have seen and (re)watch whichever episode you want next.

Both the browse (by category) and collections (themed, not sure who the creators are) are a great way to discover other content on the site.

While Shomi isn't as advanced as Netflix and Google (YouTube and Google Play), the interface and technology is considerably more advanced than what Bell offers with CraveTV or other subsidiaries( CTV.ca, space.ca sites and CTV GO, SPACE GO apps).   In an ideal world it would be CraveTV/etc shutting down and all that content made available on the Shomi platform, but that isn't what is happening.  Maybe Bell will purchase the platform to upgrade their services, if they have any interest in improving them.

Mr. Robot

The show I decided to watch on Shomi was the first season of Mr. Robot.  Very interesting political drama with quite a bit of technology embedded in the story. This is not your annoying abuse of technology where it is as magical as Harry Potter, but where real-world technology is being used.  You have advanced computer users using what they actually would -- Kali Linux on laptops, OpenWrt in routers -- and you see real code in real programming languages (and real apps and shell commands) popping up on screens.

You have these people using these advanced skills for political aims. How you would classify them (Hacker vs cracker, hero or villain, freedom fighter or terrorist) is really up to the viewer and having the viewer thinking about this appears to be an important part of the narrative.

I'd be posting spoilers if I said any more, and I want to recommend the show without spoiling any of the quite large number of sometimes quite twisted twists.

After watching the first season I was immediately drawn to the second season. It was aired on Showcase back in July, and is no longer available from that website. In some ways I was glad as the Showcase website is the worst streaming site I've used in decades.

I looked up in watchincanada.ca and it only suggested the second season was on iTunes.  In context, that was amusing -- many politically active advanced computer users, such as myself, consider Apple to be a political opponent and not a vendor we would ever consider using.  To put a show that would appeal to us only on a service that many of us find offensive didn't make sense.

Google Play Movies and TV

I decided to look Mr Robot up on Google Play (with Google sitting above the line of what I find politically tolerable) and found Mr Robot Season 2 for $16.99.

While Google Play Movies and TV streams like Netflix does, it is organized and priced more like DVDs with purchase and rental.  There isn't a fixed monthly price, but different pricing for different content.

As an example, Mr. Robot season 1 and 2 are $1.99 per episode, or $16.99 for the entire season (10 episodes for season 1, 12 episodes for season 2).    Game of Thrones episodes are $3.49 per episode, or $33.99 per 10 episode season which is comparable to the DVD pricing ($42.99 on Amazon.ca at the moment, but that price will likely be lower by the time it ships November 15).

Game of Thrones and Bell Media

Wait a minute? What?

Yes, I did just list Game of Thrones, which really surprised me when I saw it. I didn't even think to look for it on Google Play because everything I read and heard from fellow GoT fans suggested that Bell was blocking GoT from access to non-cable subscribers in Canada -- meaning I had to wait as with previous seasons for GoT to eventually be released on DVD in order to not infringe.  Last year the DVD was finally release in March with the next season starting broadcast at the end of April.  It was almost a full year with other fans blurting out spoilers in my presence, making the series less enjoyable for me as time went on.

I saw no mention of Google Play in a series of CBC articles in April,  May and June where Bell was claiming it was easy to pay and yet Bell representatives only spoke of cable-tied options. When you look at the Game of Thrones page on the HBO Canada (Bell) site there is no mention of non-cable alternatives for paying for the series. Not even a mention of DVDs of older seasons.  The HBO Canada site mentions TMN GO which offers GoT for streaming, but their FAQ clearly states "At this time, TMN GO is only offered as part of a subscription to The Movie Network through a participating Television Service Provider. It is not available directly through us."

When did this show become available on Google Play for Canadians? Canadians are often blocked from content available to US customers from services like Netflix and Google Play -- and there is no equivalent to Hulu or Amazon Prime Video, so I quite legitimately assumed all talk about US alternatives including HBO GO didn't apply to Canadians.  Has it been available for a few seasons, just hidden from fans, or only made available this year?  Was it only made available some time this summer because of media attention made to the fact that HBO Canada (Bell) has been refusing to allow fans to pay?

Similar to shows which offer new episodes weekly during the broadcast period the GoT Google Play page says "Purchase Season 6 and it will be available for playback and added to your library as soon as it's available for release".  Did I really have a legal option to watch starting at the end of April which Bell deliberately hid from me?  Why no mention in the interviews that CBC did of Bell representatives, potentially informing fans of the option back in May when it was first being released?

Like most of my interactions with the "Canadian" broadcasters I feel frustrated at how disrespectful I'm treated as a fan.

To confirm that Google Play wasn't talking about the timing of the DVD release next month and that it was already available, I purchased the season and immediately confirmed episode 10 is playable (just the start of opening sequence -- spoilers!).  I then logged into Amazon.ca and canceled my pre-order of the DVD box set.

These are market problems that must be discussed as Bell likely sees Google Play as competition for cable, putting them in a conflict of interest situation which makes them unsuited to own "HBO Canada".  The lack of mention of non-cable alternatives by HBO Canada (Bell) is something that the competition bureau, CRTC and HBO should be watching closely.  The HBO Canada site should be focused on the widest possible distribution in Canada of HBO content, not be a way for Bell to try to push people to legacy BDU services - that's tied selling, not a legitimate business practice, and is a practice that shouldn't be tolerated in Canada.

If our Copyright Act was modern the lack of even mentioning legal alternatives would clarify that Bell is at the root of infringement in Canada (not fans), and Bell (or the copyright holder who inappropriately gave them an exclusive license in Canada) shouldn't be allowed to complain about infringement which Bell is inducing.

Bell isn't the victim, but perpetrators of contributory copyright infringement.

Saying "sit down, shut up, and get a cable package" is a matter of control and conformity, not compensation, and copyright law shouldn't be able to be abused by companies which demonstrate they are uninterested in compensation.

If Bell was the slightest bit interested in protecting HBO's copyright in Canada they would be featuring all methods of paying clearly on the HBO Canada website.  In my mind one way to tell when copyright law is modern is if it forced copyright holder like HBO to go after contributory infringers like Bell first before they would be allowed to go after private citizens.

Technology

The Google Play Movies and TV's technology has features even beyond Netflix. Like Netflix its Chromecast app supports HDMI CEC, and as the same company that created the Chromecast devices will always support each new feature with advancing revisions of the device and software.  While Google Play has its own app, purchased content is also visible through the YouTube app so that convenience (or distraction depending on your preferences) is available.

Missing from Netflix, Google Play has an offline mode where you can pre-cache episodes and watch offline - such as when flying or other travel when Internet connectivity is unreliable or not fast enough for streaming.

There is a really cool feature I hadn't seen before when watching GoT episodes. While casting to the larger TV screen, circles were popping up on the tablet with the names of the actors (and characters) as well as the names of songs that are part of the soundtrack as they were part of the scene. This is a great use of the 2'nd screen beyond showing how far I am in the video. I couldn't find what this was with quick searching, so if anyone already knows I would appreciate links/etc. This is an amazing feature for shows like GoT that have many different story lines and many different characters moving forward in parallel. Now all I'd love to see is a map of Westeros in the background showing where people are :-)

Unfortunately you can't watch Google Play purchased content on all YouTube compatible devices. My Samsung Smart TV indicated "Video not playable on this device" when I tried to watch Mr. Robot episodes. Searching pointed me to the following answer on Google Video distribution settings which suggests that the copyright holder deliberately decided to disallow the content to work on this type of device.  This means the full remote control functionality (rewind, etc) is not available like it would be for regular YouTube or Netflix content using the Smart TV apps.

Market issues

When viewing the Mr. Robot content on the YouTube app I noticed it shows "NBCUniversalShowsCanada" as the user.  This got me thinking about who the supplier is for this content.  I looked up DC's Legends of Tomorrow and on a side-bar it indicates "More from CTV" and shows Arrow.  The Flash doesn't indicate who the distributor is, and Supergirl indicates Showcase.

This opens an obvious question: what will motivate broadcasters to fix their streaming sites when they can point to the expensive access via Google Play as if it were an alternative? I was considering paying for Supergirl season 2 to get away from the horrible Showcase website, but now that I know that it is Showcase that would get part of my money I dropped that idea.  I feel like I'm being pick-pocketed, not treated as a potential valued customer.

I'm quite uncomfortable with the idea that any part of my GoT payment is going to a contributory infringer (Bell) rather than only to HBO.

When I dropped cable I did so with the understanding that I would be redirecting as a minimum the money I was spending on cable to streaming services and DVDs.  I've been very happy with Netflix for new and older programming, have recently learned to hold my nose (try to forget it's Bell) and tolerate CraveTV and would have tolerated Shomi for older shows.  If CTV GO allowed me to log in via my CraveTV subscription it would make both services more valuable.

Google Play as a technology works great, and I would use it often if the broadcasters and/or copyright holders were more reasonable on pricing.  For about the same amount of money I am left with a trade-off between waiting for a late DVD release or purchasing through Google Play.  Google Play works on fewer devices, and because files are encrypted it is unknown when my paid library will cease to be "legally" accessible. As with other similar proprietary encrypted file formats, content available through Google Play cannot be trusted to be playable as long as a DVD will.

One option copyright holders should consider is appropriately priced bundles (Play now, receive DVD at release time) so that the ephemeral nature of encrypted Google Play content wouldn't deter purchases.  I have seen the reverse with recent "DVD + Digital HD" purchases where the "Digital HD" can be redeemed through Google Play.

The inclusion of Google Play among other options is much improved over purchases where you could only redeem through iTunes, which is useless to me. The DVD boxes and retailers don't indicate what service the "Digital HD" version is tied to, so I need to presume it doesn't exist and thus that possibility never adds value when I'm determining whether to purchase.  It is sad just how poor the studios are at marketing their own products, and how ignorant they are of how much the distribution medium matters.

Denying access to non-Canadian Netflix is counterproductive to protecting creator and cultural rights

Canadian Netflix users have noticed that their cross-border access is being denied. Acccording to Michael Geist, when Heritage Canada official briefed their new minister about Copyright they listed "targeting copyright infringement that occurs on virtual private networks, and “hybrid” legal/illegal services that may be a reference to Canadians accessing U.S. Netflix."

While I agree that the use of VPNs to access content otherwise not available in Canada should be considered an emerging issue for the Heritage Minister, the policy proposals I would have are grounded in fairness created by balancing the relevant rights rather than pandering to special interests.

As I wrote earlier, I see copyright as an expression of the two parts of article 27 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states:

(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

While I'm aware some believe copyright should allow copyright holders to control any and all uses of a copyright work, I believe that this control should extend only as far as it furthers the rights expressed in article 27 -- and no further.  This means there should be no control when the material and moral interests of a creator is not being impacted, as well as there being no control when such control unduly restricts cultural rights.

I have suggested that expanding Canadian Fair Dealings would be appropriate as part of a solution to the  Orphan Works problem.   A generalization of the copyright modernization I would like to see would be something like.

Fair dealing for non-commercial uses of works not otherwise offered for license under reasonable terms is not an infringement of copyright.

This would be used in scenarios where there is no harm to an authors material interests as they have already chosen to not accept money.  Contrary to the "sky is falling" emotions I heard expressed during the copyright hearings, this refusal to accept money is far more common than fans refusing to pay when legitimate payment options are offered.  This is something that should be properly studied by Canadian government officials interested in creating policies to better protect the rights of Canadians, rather than accepting the chicken-little claims of special interest groups and their lobbyists.

While I believe it should be the right of  a copyright holder to not bother to offer a license, I don't believe they should then have the right to abuse copyright to sue or otherwise go after those who access the works anyway.  While I believe it is the right of a copyright holder to refuse our money, I don't believe it should be the right of anyone other that the copyright holder to choose to collect money which is why I would put the non-commercial use restriction.


The use of VPN technology to cross-border access content would fall under this required balance of rights.  We are discussing scenarios where copyright holders, either directly or indirectly through faulty grants of exclusive distribution rights, have opted to not make content available to Canadians through content distribution channels.  While I believe it is their right to not bother to collect money, I do not believe it is their right to claim that this cross-border activity is harmful or infringing, or to act in any way (political or technological) to block it.

Simply put, I believe it should be clearly a matter of fair dealings under Canadian law for Canadians to access content made legally available in countries other than Canada.  There is no harm to authors rights in allowing this, but there is harm to the cultural rights of Canadians to deny access.  This policy would provide additional incentives to copyright holders to increase access to creative works to Canadians, and incentives for them to accept money being offered to them.

There are changes to the law beyond copyright that should be considered.  If an author has transferred copyright and the new holder of copyright refuses to license the work for a maximum amount of time, copyright should revert back to the author (at least for all markets where the copyright holder has refused licensing).  If an exclusive license was granted to a distributor in a specific region and that distributor is not offering licenses in that region under reasonable terms, the exclusivity of the license should be considered void and the copyright holder should be protected in their right to shop elsewhere in that region for better distribution (without any financial harm to the copyright holder).

In general, the law should not be about granting control and denying access, but about creating any and all incentives and protections to facilitate markets which will allow material rewards to flow from fans of the works to authors.

The control we see in copyright should only be seen as a means to an end, and never as an end itself. Copyright law should protect the rights expressed in article 27 and never be allowed to be abused to infringe those rights.

Trans-Pacific Partnership would lock Canada into Harper's mistakes

The following is the text of a letter sent to our Prime Minister, my local MP, and a few key ministers.

---

The Right Honourable Justin P. J. Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada

Copies to:

David McGuinty, M.P., Ottawa South (my riding)

The Honourable Chrystia Freeland, Minister of International Trade (asking for feedback on TPP)

The Honourable Navdeep Singh Bains,  Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development (Non-owner locks on digital technology has great impact on this portfolio. Industry Minister listed as responsible for Copyright Act currently tainted with problematic policy)

The Honourable Kirsty Duncan,  Minister of Science (Support for problematic policy largely comes from science fiction belief of how technology works.  Policy needs scientific evidence based review)



Prime Minister Trudeau,

We met at your constituency office in July 2010, and you tweeted my summary of the meeting to your followers: https://twitter.com/JustinTrudeau/status/19273983682

We discussed the then Harper Government copyright bill, with my emphasis being on the technological measures aspect of the Bill.   While I believe Harper made some serious mistakes in that part of the bill, I am writing you today to alert you to the fact that section article 18.68 of the Trans-Pacific Partnership would lock Canada into Harper's mistake.

When talking about technological measures, what people often call "digital locks", it is important to understand that there are two locks and not one.

A lock on copyrighted works, nearly always in the form of "encrypted media", cannot do much on its own. Contrary to the common science fiction belief, copyrighted works can not "come alive" and decide to do things (to be copied or not, to self destruct after rental period, etc).  What encrypted media can do is try to tie the decryption and use of the media to devices that are "authorized" by the copyright holder.  Rather than this being a copyright issue, this is a competition law issue (section 77 tied selling) which has all the economic and other harm that requires competition law.

The more critical issue is that, while there are legitimate business arrangements available, the only devices that ever get "authorized" are locked in a way that treats owners as an intruder.  In no other aspect of our lives do we allow third parties to lock owners out of their property, and this should be explicitly prohibited with digital technology.  Discussing copyright in this context is a distraction as the relevant issues include property rights, software transparency and software accountability.  When discussing this policy I would often mention privacy and other human rights infringing telecommunications equipment, medical devices, online banking and retail, and technology used for voting.  More recent issues to add to the list are driverless vehicles, drones, and the Volkswagen emissions scandal. There have been demonstrations of intruders remotely disabling a Jeep while it was on a highway.

Non-owner locks on devices also disallow owners installing software that would extend the useful life of hardware, allowing hardware vendors to force premature hardware upgrades, which has a great impact on the environment.

As more and more aspects of our lives, including basic issues such as transportation, communications, privacy and public safety, are intermediated by computers we must enact legislation that protects software transparency and accountability.  Technologies such as encrypted media abused to tie the ability to access creative works to non-owner locked devices must be legally prohibited, not legally protected as under Harper's bill C-11.  Non-owner locks on devices must be legally prohibited, as owners and others can't have unjustifiable barriers to doing independent software audits.

There is a shorter-term fix to Harper's mistake:  The WIPO treaties never required Canada to enact legislation against "access control" technological measures, but instead required "use control" where the prohibition against circumvention had a direct tie to copyright infringing activities.  This is as it was written in the Liberal Bill C-60, and must be the direction Canada moves.  Unfortunately the TPP calls for "access control" technological measures, which must be rejected.  Canada needs to be actively working with our trade partners to move away from any support for "access control" technological measures, aggressively rejecting claims from extremists who are opposed to (or deliberately oblivious to) technology ownership, software transparency and software accountability.

The technological measures section of the TPP is in addition to article 14.17 which opposes basic software transparency and accountability, and which Stewart Baker (first Assistant Secretary for Policy at the USA's Department of Homeland Security) also suggests is "a bad topic for a trade deal" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/11/06/cybersecurity-and-the-tpp/

The Harper government's promotion of the TPP was simplistic: Free trade is good, this is free trade, so therefore it is good.   The policies I oppose will reduce competition, increase barriers to trade, and reduce accountability for government procurement -- all policies which have no business being included in something alleging to be a "free trade" agreement.

I live in Ottawa South, and work on Wellington Street close to your parliamentary offices.  I can be made available to any minister, member of your caucus, or their staff, to discuss this issue further.

Russell McOrmond
[address removed]

Please share with your colleagues as this policy also has serious implications for other portfolios including Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, Public Services and Procurement, Health, Transport, and National Defence.

---

Note: I quote Stewart Baker in the introduction page for the Petition to protect Information Technology property rights

A (non)Copyright question in a Canadian federal election 2015 quiz.

On Monday many co-workers were circulating around a links to political quizzes.  I was asked what I thought about one that included a copyright related question, and if I was happy that Copyright was considered important enough to be part of one of these quizzes.

I would have been excited, except that what I found was one of those non-copyright related issues which people commonly lump in with copyright law -- including governments who add these non-copyright related issues to copyright acts.

The issue is so-called "digital locks", which when applied to content in the form of encrypted media are a competition law issues (Tied selling) and when applied to devices and software is a property law issue (IE: non-owners applying locks to things they don't own).

The wording of the question and the available answers were:

Should the government allow digital publishers to place locks on their content (MP3s, etc)?

Yes

No

Let the free market, instead of the government, decide

Yes, locks are critical to protecting artist's revenues

Add your own stance

I of course clicked "Add your own stance" and said "No, these locks should be considered illegal tied selling under competition law.  There has been no proof that these technologies benefit the interests of artists."

• I obviously disagree with the unjustified "Yes"
• Saying "No" over-simplifies the question and allows the presumption in the question that this is an issue that only or even primarily affects "digital publishers" and thus they should be the only ones involved in decision.  The impact to software authors and hardware owners is far greater than the impact to "digital publishers" - and in all cases the impact is negative (Beneficiary is hardware vendors).
• Statutory monopoly laws are a massive government intervention in the market, so the pseudo-libertarian folks can't have it both ways.  Other than those with an orthodox ideologically blinded view on statutory monopolies, most recognize a need to have anti-trust/competition and other laws balance the statutory monopolies granted by government in copyright, patent and related laws.
• I have yet to see evidence that encrypted media (digital locks, access controls applied to multimedia files) protect rather than threaten artist's revenues.  Most analysis that claims benefit are based on incorrect understandings of how the technologies actually work, and thus lead to incorrect conclusions about the impact.

The Bill C-11 FAQ contains quite a bit of information on digital locks and the real-world issues around them (Rather than the Harry Potter fictional understanding most non-technical people have of digital locks).

Legitimacy of new TV options CraveTV (Bell) and Shomi (Rogers, Shaw)

As Shomi received a lot of advertising in recent months I have been asked my opinion on it. I'm known as someone who has strong opinions on digital content distribution, and as someone who is a subscriber to Netflix and not to any traditional BDU (Broadcast Distribution Undertaking, the term the CRTC uses to refer to Satellite, Cable, and related companies).

My shortest answer is to say these these services aren't new, nor are they in the same market as Netflix. These services are an add-on service for existing BDU customers (Must be Television customer for Bell, but can be existing TV or Internet customer for Rogers and Shaw), and not a service that is untied to the BDU.

Rogers launched Rogers On Demand Online back in 2009, and I tried it back then when I was still a Rogers cable customer. I could almost watch a movie on my desktop computer with it, but it didn't work on the various devices I had connected to my television. It was a poorly implemented technology which they likely upgraded a bit for the rebranding and new marketing as Shomi, but it isn't correct to claim it is a new service.

CraveTV may be a new brand for Bell, but it should remind us all of iCraveTV which was an online BDU competitor which the BDUs lobbied the government to wipe out. Given the corruption in various levels of government when it comes to BDUs, it wasn't surprising when Bill C-11 passed in 2002. This made illegal a series of companies that were offering services as legitimate as the services of BDUs, but offering it over the Internet in a way that was Internet provider neutral.

This should remind us that we would have had legitimate Made In Canada competitors long before Netflix launched in 2008. For all the flag waiving that the BDUs include in their anti-competitive lobbying, it is the BDUs that have been consistently in the way of new services being launched. Their policy against legitimate Internet distribution of multimedia content is one of the many policy reasons why I continue to refuse to be a BDU customer.

Back in 2012 I wrote two articles on my move away from legacy phone/cable companies and a submission to the CBC where they asked "What does "radio" and "television" mean to you?.

As an update I will list the legitimate sources of television content I currently use, and the illegitimate ones I do not.

Legitimate

• By far the most television content I watch is via NetFlix. This is a service that is neutral to the Internet provider I choose, and works on nearly all of the devices that I own (Samsung SmartTV, Boxee Box, Chomebook, Chromecast, Android tablets and smartphones, desktop computers running Linux)
  
• Next largest source is DVD, where the copyright holders are slowly getting better and releasing faster than they previously did. While some sources like HBO wait for 9+ months to release, others like the BBC will release seasons of shows less than 3 months after the series aires on television.
  
• There is some content I try to access on broadcaster sites such as Space.ca, but they are poorly implemented and work on few of the devices I own. In the case of Space they even have an Android app, but it is so slow that its unusable. I am able to watch on my old desktop computer in the basement, but that is so inconvenient that I only bother for one specific show (Doctor Who). Space is one of the better sites, with other Canadian broadcaster websites being even less useable.
  
• Over the Air -- we have ATSC digital tuners in our TVs, and I have an antenna for the TV upstairs. My wife sometimes watches this, but I find traditional broadcast television scheduling annoying. I have an ATSC tuner in one of my computers which I could program to record with PVR software, but I haven't found enough compelling content OTA to bother. This is available to watch breaking news if some event is happening I want to keep up on, which hasn't happened for me yet since I set this up in 2012.
  

Illegitimate

• Copyright infringing online sources -- I keep being reminded by family and friends that all the content I want to access is available online moments after it airs on television. While I haven't refused to watch content with them in their homes, I refuse this option myself.
  
• Traditional BDUs -- While I have friends and family who are subscribers to BDUs, and I don't refuse to watch content with them in their homes, I refuse this option myself. I consider the traditional BDUs to be opponents to Canadian Television, as well as being in a conflict of interest when it comes to the Internet. As policy opponents I refuse to pay them money (beyond what is mandated by corruption in government through monopolies in spectrum and last-mile wires), just as someone in the executive of the Conservative Party of Canada might refuse to make large political donations to the NDP and Liberals. (Actually, I suspect the Conservatives disagree with the Liberals and NDP on policy far less than I disagree with the BDUs, but that's a conversation to have over beer).
  
• Tied selling services such as Shomi and CraveTV -- these are services I believe should be considered illegal under section 77 of Canada's Competition Act. The type of market manipulation that Bell, Rogers and Shaw are engaged in is exactly the type of wealth destroying behaviour that the Competition Act was created to stop. Unfortunately I suspect that this extremely harmful illegitimate behaviour is less likely to be prosecuted than the (in my opinion orders of magnitude less harmful) copyright infringement option.
  

(Note: Also Posted to Digital Copyright Canada)

Update: I should have noted the announcement: HBO to offer streaming-only online option in 2015. Here is to hoping that my inevitable posting next January about this issue will include the fact I've had months of enjoyment of the HBO service.

Will you explain why DRM is bad?

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.