"Music Theory", "Canadian Values" and the Department of Canadian Heritage

I am recommending a video discussing music theory, but I feel it should have a bit more Canadian context.

Remember the controversy when Kellie Leitch suggested having a screening of new immigrants for "Canadian Values"?  Some provinces and the federal government have related screening, so the suggestion being controversial is subjective.

While conceived of during the Brian Mulroney government, and formalized during the short Kim Campbell government, the Department of Canadian Heritage was fully formed during the Jean Chrétien government. The department's first Minister was Sheila Copps (1996-2003).

The following is an excerpt from the Department of Canadian Heritage Act.

4 (1) The powers, duties and functions of the Minister extend to and include all matters over which Parliament has jurisdiction, not by law assigned to any other department, board or agency of the Government of Canada, relating to Canadian identity and values, cultural development and heritage. (emphasis added)

While it shouldn't need saying, this continent isn't part of Europe. And yet it is two European languages and cultures (English and French) that are the primary focus of the Heritage Act, department, and parliamentary committee. That bi-colonialism is also core to the so-called "Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms", imposed during the P.E. Trudeau era.


Let's think about "Music Theory".

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.)

---

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.)

European multiculturalism vs Indigenization as Inclusion, Reconcilliation and Decolonization.

This week's NS 115 class and reading has, yet again, forced me into thinking in a new way. I wanted to share some of those thoughts and possibly get some feedback and/or discussion.

The first theme was multiculturalism.  It came up in the lecture, but also a thread that Dr. Kim TallBear posted to twitter prior to the lecture.

 

when we are told to simply trust SCIENCE---"LET THE SCIENCE SPEAK"--are we supposed to ignore that science has been built on the bodies of the marginalized with little regard for our agency & capacity to consent? are libs truly this ignorant of their colonial foundation?

— Kim TallBear (@KimTallBear) January 23, 2021

To put the thinking in my own words, multiculturalism in a Canadian sense allows diversity in those spaces which are not predetermined by the systems of Canada.  Dr. Tallbear regularly talks of the collaboration between Church, State, and Science.

As a British subsidiary, the laws of Canada were adopted from British laws, and all its history including the fact that it is built upon Christian law. Until the Canada Act 1982 was passed in the UK parliament, when Canada is said to have "patriated" its constitution, laws passed in the UK were automatically treated as Canadian law. All the structures of Canada, right down to the British ceremonies carried out by the parliaments, are predetermined .

What is left are things such as clothing, fashion, music, dance, and food. The bulk of what makes you the person you were in the place you are from is replaced with European/British systems which you must adopt in order to live here.

This narrow definition of culture should be understood as predicated on indigenous erasure. Unlike if you immigrated to a non-colonial country where you would be expected to adapt to the laws of the land as they were developed over time, with "Canada" you are expected to adopt to foreign British systems, and the systems helps to ensure that you remain ignorant of the laws and social structures of the peoples and land you have moved to.

I know the power of these systems as I was born on this land and lived the majority of my life (I'm 52) without knowing what Canada was and how it actually exists, vs the propaganda I was told about so-called "nation building" (vs "nation replacing" or genocide).

This discussion of multiculturalism as erasure convinced me to read more.  With a quick search I found a masters thesis by Rebecca Shrubb titled: "Canada Has No History Of Colonialism." Historical Amnesia: The Erasure of Indigenous Peoples From Canada's History.

Multiculturalism and multicultural studies came to fruition in Canada in the seventies. Originally a political strategy introduced by the Trudeau Government, multiculturalism was intended to reduce the nation-claims of both Quebecois and First Nations to the status of ethnic groups. Prior to the induction of multiculturalism however, the Canadian government officially declared Canada a bilingual and bicultural nation. Commonly known as the Bi and Bi Commission, this new national identity was constructed by the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism.

 

Some people are stuck on the "cult of individuality", which pulls them out of time as you don't see their connection to the past or future. We are talking about the government of Pierre Elliot Trudeau and not the current Trudeau government, although the current Prime Minister follows in his fathers footsteps in many ways.  This includes his progressive-sounding talk which masks the ongoing promotion of colonialism (which is itself a form of White Supremacy on Turtle Island) of that government.

I personally believe that when you adjust for the time period that the Trudeau's are as problematic as Sir John A. Macdonald. I don't consider any Prime Minister of colonial Canada as deserving of statues or airports/buildings being named after them.
 

 

This brings me to one of the articles assigned this week: Indigenization as inclusion, reconciliation, and decolonization: navigating the different visions for indigenizing the Canadian Academy (DOI: 10.1177/1177180118785382 )

The article was focused on the academy, but I kept thinking about governance and democratic institutions as that is one of my passions.  The article discussed a 3 part spectrum for indiginization.

 

• Indigenous Inclusion, which is to try to include Indigenous students and faculty into existing institutions.  The idea is that if you include people, that this will automatically make those institutions more "multicultural".  Understanding multiculturalism as continuing colonialism, this ultimately isn't a solution to any problem beyond historical explicit exclusion.

From a governance level I always remember that at Confederation only a subset of white males were allowed to vote.

Only when the settler population had grown (through immigration and other policies) to overshadow the indigenous population was that indigenous population allowed to vote. While settlers watch the USA and their gerrymandering and voter suppression, there is little recognition that Canada uses voter suppression and immigration policies to achieve similar anti-democratic results.

While non-white immigrants may grow in population, the fact that they have been assimilated into British systems means that they will vote along the criteria set out to them by those systems ,and won't be putting pressure to fundamentally change democratic institutions to not be British or otherwise European.

While indigenous people are currently allowed to vote, and can be elected as members of parliaments, this requires conformity to the British systems and its values in order to have any political influence.

While the existing nations had their own governance pre-contact and pre-Confederation, and largely governance that had active participation across all genders, colonialism involved forcibly deposing and/or not recognizing the existence of these democratic governments.  Indian Act band councils are not responsible Indigenous governments, but a foreign bureaucracy responsible only to the Canadian Crown.

There are many pro-Democracy freedom fighting campaigns against the anti-democratic policies of Canada, but settlers continue to believe such pro-Democracy campaigns are only possible overseas against other foreign governments as they believe in "Canada the good" and not the real colonial Canada.

• Reconciliation indigenization involves more than adding Indigenous people to existing institutions, but to remove “epistemic ignorance” of Indigenous knoweldges.

I wonder if we are seeing a start of this with how northern Territories are governed. While the Nunavut government is still situated under the Canadian Crown, and thus is not self-government, it does use a consensus government form that is very different from the extremely hierarchical (and monarchy-like) structures we see in the provinces and Canadian federal government.

It would be interesting if this trend could continue to include all of the Inuit Nunangat, separating Nunavik from Quebec and separating Nunatsavut from Newfoundland and Labrador, allowing at the minimum similar governance that has been enabled for Nunavut for all 4 regions.

Over time I wonder if similar can be done with other regions of the Dene peoples, extending territorial governance further south into more of the boreal regions within Canada.  There are primarily Indigenous populated northern parts of "provinces" which have absolutely nothing in common with the more colonialized southern parts. Those voices should not be suffocated by the foreign southern voices.

• Decolonial indigenization discussed some varieties
• Treaty-based decolonial indigenization which envisions a "dual university" structure, with exchanges between them modeled on what the treaties were intended to be treated as.

 

In governance this is the discussion of self-governance, restoring the ability of First Nations, Metis and Inuit to manage their own governance in parallel with Canada, rather than the current structure where Canada tries to make FNMI subservient to Canada. As discussed earlier, restoring rights of self-determination can start immediately as some nations have retained their governance structures that simply need to be fully acknowledged.

This is the most often discussed endpoint for decolonization, with the European created government and its citizens finally fully honoring the treaties they made to be allowed to exist on and share Turtle Island.

I personally hope that it is only a stepping stone to moving further.

• Resurgence-based decolonial indigenization "where decolonization looks to transform existing institutions, to remake colonial structures in a new image".

 

This is not something I'm aware of being discussed in the context of governance, and I am interested to know if anyone has heard of this. I wonder if it is possible to transform all the systems of Canada to eventually be legitimately considered a domestic rather than a foreign system.

 

Until this article I had always been assuming the ultimate goal of decolonization to be to have Turtle Island governed entirely by Indigenous governments, with colonial governance fading into history.  This would be a complete form of #LandBack, recognizing the many centuries demonstrated inability of persons with western worldviews to peacefully share land.

This would involve any qualified settler eventually being adopted into a host nation.

I have my ideas, but I am curious to hear what other people believe is realistically to hope for, in what time period, and where we may eventually end up?

 

Is optimism naive?

While I have moments of optimism as I learn, I also worry about the opposite possibility.

Canada is current engaged in what could be called a "cold genocide" similar to a "cold war". I am quite worried about the possibility of Canada being unable to modernize and become what in modern times would be considered civilized. It is possible that Canada would launch a "warm genocide" against Indigenous peoples if the powerful felt too threatened by modern ideas of civilization.

If Canada didn't stand in the way of the full recognition of human rights, there will still be other threats.  What is the future of the USA?

I believe because of global dynamics that the nations of the northern part of Turtle Island would need to have adequately coordinated defense, something along the lines of what NATO did for Europeans. I worry that without such planning early that Europeans and/or their settlements might try to launch the conquest that many settlers incorrectly believe happened in the past.  Part of the excuse the British gave for their illegal westward expansion was to "protect" against northward expansion of the separatists of the United States. Veterans of the wars against US expansion have never been honored by Canada, including land grants.

Turtle Island Nations will need to have strong alliances with other nations at the United Nations to ensure they are not left entirely along in their defense.

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”

Canada needs a ‘Great Council,’ similar to Upper House, made up of Indigenous peoples who would review all federal, provincial laws

On Page 8 of the July 27, 2020 issue of The Hill Times, a letter I submitted was published.

Re: “Forty-nine days of racism in the news,” (The Hill Times, July 13, by Rose LeMay). Racism isn’t merely a matter of an individual person having a conscious dislike of another individual or a group. To quote Dr. Robin Diangelo, racism is “a default system that institutionalizes an unequal distribution of resources and power between white people and people of colour. This system is historic, taken for granted, deeply embedded, and it works to the benefit of whites.”

While most people will focus on the present, I would like to suggest we fix a historical injustice. Under Canada’s British Westminster parliamentary system, we never adopted an equivalent of their House of Lords, or their Upper House. The House of Lords developed from the “Great Council” that advised the king. When Europeans came to Turtle Island there were already people here with their own traditions and governance. When a new government was formed it should, at a minimum, have included some of that governance in the Upper House through an Indigenous council similar to the “Great Council.” The membership of this Indigenous council would be decided by Indigenous people, with non-Indigenous persons disallowed influence. Instead, we have seen hundreds of years of oppression of those who preceded the Europeans. The racist “Indian Act” still exists rather than an Indigenous council capable of sending back to the federal or provincial Lower Houses any laws which require a sober second (including non-racist) thought.

I am a European descendant born in Canada.

 

My hope is that Canadians will eventually take the time to learn the history of this region of the world, including the history from before Europeans "discovered" this land and started to eradicate the ideas and people they found here.

 

Budget 2018 Investment in Canadian Content a missed opportunity

I checked Federal Budget 2018 for new support of Canadian content creators.  What I found under the title of "INVESTING IN CANADIAN CONTENT" (Chapter 4) is disappointing, as it is media creation that continues the conflict of interest tie with the broadcast sector.

The CMF receives funding contributions from the Government of Canada, but it advertises as also receiving "contributions" from Canada’s cable, satellite and IPTV distributors (Broadcast Distribution Undertakings, or BDUs). 

CMF contributions are mandated by the CRTC, shouldn't be thought of as donations, and BDUs shouldn't be "thanked" for actually paying what they owe. CMF contributions should be thought of as a highly justifiable tax on BDUs as compensation to the public for the right-of-way and other privileges which BDUs have been granted by multiple levels of governments.  The CMF contributions page should only list the Government of Canada, with special taxes collected from BDUs being earmarked for small-screen content creation.

The problem with this money being seen as coming from BDUs is that the BDUs then believe they "own" this content and should have the right to deny this content being available from competing legal streaming services.

As discussed in my recent CRTC submission opposing "site" blocking, the business practices of the BDUs do not support the interests of content creators, and are all too often a form of contributory infringement.  A condition of CMF funding should be that the results be made available via legal streaming, at least simultaneously with any broadcast.  I am not suggesting that the content be free, but that all Canadians be given the right to pay without also needing to subscribe to any BDU or access via broadcasting.

While I welcome stable arts and cultural funding from any level of government, I do not consider an increase in funding of the CMF to be an example.  The appearance of a tie to BDUs ties that federal money to the ongoing battles that the BDUs are having with legal streaming services.  This prolongs the current instability.  The fact that (un)Fairplay contains a few vocal stockholm syndrome victims (creator groups who incorrectly believe the BDUs and broadcasters support their interests) suggests that this will continue to be a problem.

While I support the new STEM money for granting councils, it is unfortunate I didn't see new money for arts.  There is only a small mention under "Supporting Canada’s Official Languages".

CBC

I found no reference to the CBC, suggesting the federal contribution and policy surrounding the CBC is unchanged.

This is also unfortunate, as instead of the CBC being part of the solution to the problematic tie between the cultural industries and historic distributors, the CBC has continued to be part of the problem.

The CBC decided to sign onto the BDU's (un)Fairplay coalition.  While it might be nice to think of the CBC as creators who are only stockholm syndrome victims, I believe they are acting as a commercial broadcaster who sees the inevitable move away from broadcasting and BDUs as a threat.

I've proposed that the CBC be split up, with government funding only offered to content creation.  This splitting up would effectively be an increase in cultural sector funding, as the private sector broadcasting arm will fade away as broadcasting is replaced with streaming.  Having a more competitive private sector distribution market needing to bid on programming also drives up the cost of higher quality content, meaning more money for the content creators.

 

Intellectual Property

 

This term appears in the budget a few times. While there is a focus on patents, copyright policies can help or hinder the interests of the arts and cultural sectors.  Proposed legal clinics and increased literacy might help artists and other creators to harness (rather than be fearful of) new distribution mechanisms and technologies.

While an "intellectual property marketplace" was mentioned in the context of public sector-owned intellectual property, this is needed in the private sector as well.  I mentioned in my CRTC submission how hard it is for Canadian fans to find content on legal streaming services, and the need for public disclosure of exclusive content distribution licenses. An expansion on the concept of an "intellectual property marketplace" could go a long way to solving this problem with a publicly searchable database of private sector arts and culture.  This licensing transparency and creation of a functioning marketplace isn't something that can be left to the existing private sector distributors who have conflicting interests, and requires government intervention at least during the transition.

Yes, CBC, I'm waiting for Alias Grace to be on Netflix.

CBC runs InCanada, an "online" Canadian Media Panel. I put "online" in quotations because while the panel is online, the CBC's broadcaster bias is always visible in how they ask questions. The latest survey is no exception.

The survey was essentially about Alias Grace, a Canadian-American miniseries that will air on CBC on September 25, 2017, and on Netflix on November 3, 2017.

The survey typically conflates Netflix with broadcasters, when Netflix is not a broadcaster. This is about as nonsensical as confusing a radio station with a record store when discussing music, and yet the legacy broadcasters continue to try to push this nonsense.

I sometimes make the comparison to the difference between an outhouse and indoor plumbing: Like broadcasting, people made use of outhouses before modern conveniences like indoor plumbing came along. And like indoor plumbing, people aren't likely to want to go backwards once they get used to online streaming.

While outhouses still exist in places where indoor plumbing is not available, it is not the predominant way that people "do their business". Unlike with an outhouse, there is no sense of urgency to use the outmoded platform to watch Alias Grace.


The survey asked if I saw the American series The Handmaid's Tale (TV series). While this was distributed by Hulu starting in April 2017, the series was blocked from Canadian access by Bell until they made it available on CraveTV in late July. Bell blocking, hiding and/or delaying lawful access to content is typical, and I consider them to be the largest Canadian contributory copyright infringer for their ongoing inducement of infringement.


If the NAFTA negotiations were intended to modernize trade relations within North America, the trade barriers disallowing cross-boarder shopping for telecommunications services and creative content would be a top priority. I believe we could massively reduce copyright infringement in North America if we moved to a single content market, where creators from the entire of North America had unrestricted access to the audiences of North America. That includes the content distribution services. North American audiences should also have the right to subscribe to any North American streaming service, and regional content restrictions within North America would be prohibited.

The concept of Canadians not being to view content at the same time as US audiences, including having the option to subscribe to the same online distribution services, must quickly become a distant memory.


Canadian Content policy should be focused on content, not on outdated distribution mechanisms. Hopefully a pro-free trade agenda will be part of the current Heritage Minister's thinking: you can't promote Canadian production capabilities and wide global distribution of Canadian content while still allowing regional content blocking.


Bell's anti-free trade agenda is trying to push policy in the opposite direction, including asking for mandated blocking when Canadians wish to access content that is not lawfully streamed in Canada. Bell is asking for mandated blocking because they want competitors to have to block the same competing distribution sites Bell already wants to block, which is also why they oppose VPNs (Apparently the technology, not only the perfectly legitimate cross-boarder-shopping use).

If I wanted to watch The Handmaid's Tale when US viewers were (or those that can tolerate the smell of an outhouse/broadcaster), or on the devices of my choosing, I would be forced to infringe copyright (easiest) or use a VPN (Less convenient, but currently more lawful).

There was no sense of urgency to watch The Handmaid's Tale. While there are shows that are important enough to me that would warrant finding alternative streaming options, none of these TV series based on Margaret Atwood novels are of sufficient interest.


My wife and I watched Handmaid's Tale on CraveTV. CraveTV is a horrible streaming service: there is a difference between the indoor plumbing at a 5-star hotel and an out-of-the-way truck stop. We only watch programming on CraveTV when it is not available anywhere else. The CraveTV Android App crashes fairly regularly. CraveTV works on few of my devices, compared to Netflix which pretty much always works -- and Netflix even has a simple app built into the SmartTV such that my wife and in-laws can also use it (CraveTV is too messy for less technical people to put up with).


While CBC isn't as bad as Bell when it comes to policies, I believe their outdated broadcaster-era thinking is harmful to Canadian creators and taxpayers.

Creator groups must Focus On Creators

When the current Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly suggested that someone saying "Without culture, nobody would be on the internet" was thoughtful, and possibly even a new idea, I became aware that this is a area of policy that is new for Ms Joly.

We now see a new campaign aimed at the Minister called Focus On Creators launched by several associations which has a similar message the Minister may not have a context for.

While I am an author of software and non-software works, and in my policy analysis and activism I always have a Focus on Creators, I do not agree that all the groups who are promoting this campaign have that same focus.  All too often representatives of these groups claim the interests of some intermediary is synonymous with the interests of a group of creators, and are focused on that intermediary.
 

Technology giveth, and technology taketh away

It is normal technological and societal progress that new technology disrupts old technology, as well as the businesses and business models that formed around the older technology.

As new communications technology comes forward the creators that embrace it will succeed, and those who do not will tend to have diminishing audiences as well as diminishing financial success. When yet another communications technology comes forward to disrupt that technology, those who succeeded with the older communications technology either need to move forward or be as left behind as those who did not embrace the previous generation of technology.

From a public policy standpoint the most important thing to remember is that while technologies and the businesses that surround them will come and go, there is absolutely no reason for the interests of any specific technology provider to be thought of as synonymous with the interests of the cultural and content industries.

Opponents to the ongoing cycle of technological change

This cycle has been true since humans first started to write stories down.  There were those who thought storytelling would die if it was written down and not kept alive by storytellers passing it down from generation to generation.


There have been quite strong personalities that have been opposed to change.

• Composer John Philip Sousa was hostile to recording, arguing in 1909:

"These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape."

• Jack Valenti, longtime president of the Motion Picture Association of America, was also hostile to new technologies suggesting in 1982:

"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

• Denis McGrath, Canadian screenwriter and councillor for the Writers Guild of Canada, a little over a week ago had the following to say about Netflix:

"So if you were to take this out of the context of an argument about film and television, I would make the case that what we're talking about here is industrial dumping. We have laws against stuff like this."

While Mr McGrath's words may be the most recent, what he is expressing is similar to what has been said throughout written history.  There is no reason for anyone to believe the current technological changes are all that different than what we have seen in the past: some creators who tie themselves to a specific previous generation technology (and the companies and business models that form around that technology) will have problems succeeding, and creators who embrace the new technology under its own terms (including related business model changes) will prosper.

I've interacted with Mr McGrath only a few times over the years (as he tries to quickly end conversations), but all evidence suggests that he confuses the interests of the creators of television with the interests of broadcasters.  Broadcasters are the companies that formed around a very specific type of distribution technology, and should not be seen as being part of the content creation or cultural industries. Mr. McGrath and some others in the "small screen" (Television) industry have gone so far as to suggest that anything that uses wired and wireless means of communicating small screen shows, whether that communication is programmed or not, should be regulated as if they were broadcasters.

I provided more details for this scenario in: Ad free CBC? Why not shift money to creators?
The shortform is that Netflix is not a broadcaster.  While this claim helps the interests of companies that are actually broadcasters, it harms the interests of creators of "small screen" shows.

Creator groups must Focus On Creators

In my participation in Copyright revision process starting in the summer of 2001 I have interacted with many fellow creators from a wide variety of creative sectors.  I have come to know many of the creator groups and their spokespersons. I have formed a good sense of which ones are helping members navigate change, and which ones have confused the interests of their members with the interests of specific intermediaries (technology providers, business model services, funding agencies, etc).

As a creator I can't sign on to this specific "Focus on Creators" campaign.  While I strongly believe that related government policy should focus on creators, I do not believe the groups behind this specific campaign are actually focused on the interests of creators.

Intermediaries sometimes barriers to creators getting paid

During the DigiCanCon consultations, many creators wanted to speak about funding.   I believe it is important for the Minister and the department to be aware of some of the barriers some intermediaries have been putting up to creators getting paid.

We are often told how copyright infringement is a cause of declining revenues for creators.  If we focus for a moment on scripted content for the big screen (Movies) and small screen (Television) we see a number of barrier put up by specific intermediaries which make it hard for audiences to access and pay for that access.

• "Heritage Minister and Department must reduce barriers between creators and audiences" is an article discussing issues one Canadian writer and director came up against when making his movie available to audiences.
• "Notes from watching Supergirl via VPN" and "Space (Bell) has no Class when it comes to protecting copyright" discuss the problems with accessing and paying for "small screen" content, and how the business practices of Canadian broadcasters and BDUs are inducing people to infringement.
• Minister Joly wrong to want to bring tech companies "into the system". reiterates using both screen format content as examples.

Video creativity is not the only creative sector where we see changes in technologies, and the related changes in business models, being claimed to be a threat to creators.

• "Access Copyright activism disconnected from realities in educational publishing" discusses how some author activists, most notably specific individuals associated with the Writers Union and the Professional Writers Association of Canada, confuse the interests of Access Copyright with the interests of writers.  New technology has made direct licensing via online databases easier, as well as new peer production mechanisms possible, and the educational community is moving in that direction.  This only has an impact on fiction authors because of their ties with Access Copyright, with Access Copyright's primary money being an unrelated marketplace for non-fiction educational works that is being disrupted by modern technology.  The so-called "educational fair use" debate is largely about modern technology disrupting Access Copyright's older business services.

During the Bill C-32/C-11 consultations there was considerable discussion about the music industry.  In that case the interests of major labels were being confused with the very different interests of composers and performers.   The major labels were primarily a specialized banking sector formed around the high costs of the technology used to record and distribute music.  Technological advancement changed this business dynamic to where a successful industry flips the power dynamic to one where the interests of composers and performers must be the focus, and labels are only the "hired help" when and if needed by the musicians. In other words, a "Focus on Creators" is a focus on the interests of composers and performers, which are interests quite different from major labels whose interests often conflict with creators.  In Canada the major label interests are represented by "Music Canada", one of the groups behind this campaign.

Ad free CBC? Why not shift money to creators?

In response to articles discussing an advertisement free CBC, I had the following to say:

#DigiCanCon @howardalaw I would rather that money went to distribution mechanism neutral content creation: #CBC via #Netflix #GooglePlay etc

— Russell McOrmond (@russellmcormond) November 29, 2016

When I was asked to elaborate, I realized I need to give context as most people in the content industry do not think the same way as I do as a system administrators with decades of experience in the technology industry.

The layered approach to communications technology

4134   COMMISSIONER DENTON: Mr. McOrmond, interesting brief. I see it is informed by an internet idea of the world.

4135   So in your preferred solution then there would be essentially some kind of bandwidth to the house, whether wired or wireless, it would be part of a municipal infrastructure such as sewage or water, and applications would float on top of that or through it.

4136   Now, what happens to the carrier in that instance?

4137   MR. McORMOND: I am essentially suggesting that we no long would have carriers in that instance. They would be replaced by a utility and a free market.

4138   COMMISSIONER DENTON: Right. So you realize this is formally heretical and they will be onto you for this?

The above is from an intervention I made in front of the CRTC in 2009.  I'm not informed by an Interned idea of the world, but informed by the OSI model upon which most digital communications infrastructure is designed.  This model emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and was already in-place when I was learning about digital networking in the 1980's before I or most people heard of the Internet.

The core idea is quite simple:

Its goal is the interoperability of diverse communication systems with standard protocols. The model partitions a communication system into abstraction layers. The original version of the model defined seven layers.

A layer serves the layer above it and is served by the layer below it. For example, a layer that provides error-free communications across a network provides the path needed by applications above it, while it calls the next lower layer to send and receive packets that comprise the contents of that path. Two instances at the same layer are visualized as connected by a horizontal connection in that layer.

When we are talking about the layers that together offer wired Internet services, I separate the layers tied to geography (layers 1 and 2) from layers above that.  I consider all digital communications (whether it is ISP services providing IPv4 or IPv6 public routing, IPTV, cable or telephone) to be "over the top" of that service.

This is quite different than how the converged phone and BDU industries define it which is that only competitors to their own vertically integrated services are "over the top".  While I am using a neutral definition that is based on the underlying technology, they are using a business definition which privileges existing vertically integrated companies over the interests of a competitive marketplace.

This creates very different language between people from the Information Technology industries and people who are part of the converged telecom/BDU industries.

How does this layering impact the content industries?

When I look at the content industries I also see a number of layers.  Like my separation between physical networking and services that are built "over the top" I separate industries involved with the creation of content from those who are involved in the communication or distribution of that content between creators and audiences.

In the most recent "Canadian Content in a Digital World" consultations the type of content discussed most often was television ("small screen" format video content, contrasted with "big screen" format movies).

When some people think of television they bundle together everything from the first ideas that a scriptwriter has all the way to the wiring (aerial, cable/satellite/IPTV receiver) that plugs into the television.  Most stop there and at least don't consider the television manufacturers to be part of the same industry.


When I think of television I see a series of layers with interoperable interfaces between them.

• Content generation:  There are a large number of creators involved in the production of scripted (and even unscripted) shows. While there are different layers within, I feel comfortable as an audience member grouping those layers together even if the different layers are critical within the industry.
• Content distribution:  There are many interoperable and competing methods, with the following being only a few examples:
• physical media distribution, such as DVDs, through online and physical retailers
• online content libraries, which includes flat-fee subscription services like Netflix or online retailers like Google Play or Amazon Video (once launched in Canada to compliment their existing physical DVD distribution business)
• Broadcasting and BDUs, which provide pre-programmed streams of content (Note: I strongly reject claims that online content libraries are more similar to broadcasters than they are physical media retailers)
• Content access: there are a wide variety of access technologies, and an increasing number of these are networked within the home.  One content access device (receiver) may be a different home networked device than the screens used to view and the speakers used to hear, and we need vendor neutral interoperability between these devices.

In my primary submission to the DigiCanCon consultation I focused on how the government managed (I suggest mismanaged) convergence.  The transition could have been a transition from purpose-built analog networks where what was on top of the network was fixed to one that could be modeled after the OSI networking model with interoperability between services built on top of each other.


I believe the greatest threat to the content industries is ties to specific brands or technologies on other layers of the communications stack.  If, as an example, a screenwriter believed that their future is tied to that of "broadcasting" then they will try to force any type of content distribution -- even disruptive technologies that will likely replace broadcasting for most audiences of scripted programming -- to act as if they were the same "broadcasting".

This policy is of great benefit to the "broadcasting" industry, who would then have less to fear from competitors hobbled by a regulatory environment that is mismatched for these competitors.  It is, however, extremely harmful to the interests of the content industries as well as their audiences.  There are many features of some of these disruptive technologies which would benefit creators that they won't be able to harness if they incorrectly identify suppliers of these technologies as opponents.

The Innovator's Dilemma

Much of the dynamic we can see between the content industry, broadcast industry, and Canadian audiences can be explained by Clayton Christensen's 1997 textbook The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.

Over-simplifying: companies who were successful in one market have a hard time providing services based on disruptive innovation that is likely to replace the older market.

This can be seen with broadcasters, and those that see themselves as dependent on broadcasters, claiming that Netflix and other "foreign" companies are extracting money out of Canada.  Not discussed in this attempt to wave the Canadian flag is the fact that there are no domestic competitors because the incumbent content distributors are themselves "broadcasters" who see this disruptive innovation (online content libraries) as a threat. They have been unwilling to offer that service, and have done everything they can to block competitors.  The closest that will remain at the end of the month is CraveTV which isn't competitive with first-run content libraries like Netflix, most likely because it is owned by a parent company that doesn't want to disrupt its existing broadcasting and BDU services.


My own experience trying to watch Supergirl in Canada is an example of what happens.  As the "broadcast" industry was tied to specific geographic regions, much of the content licensing models have been as well.  Canada is carved out and one entity, in this case (and all too often) a broadcaster (Showcase, owned by Corus Entertainment), is granted an exclusive license for the region of Canada.  That broadcaster then doesn't want online content libraries to compete with broadcasting so doesn't advertise (or sometimes allow to be offered) legal alternatives to broadcasting, nor provide services to paying customers who have opted for existing legal alternatives.

I was essentially forced by Showcase to resort to using a VPN service to bypass region restrictions and watch Supergirl from a US source.  While I paid money to Showcase for a season pass, Showcase hasn't been willing to update the content library offered through Google Play with new episodes.

I had the same problem with other shows including Game of Thrones and BBC Class which Bell apparently would prefer I infringe copyright than find out about legal alternatives to broadcasting.

Personally, I "cut the chord" (unsubscribed from cable service) years ago, and don't want to go back any more than I want to give up indoor plumbing or other modern conveniences.

An Ad free CBC?

CBC is a large corporation that receives a large amount of public money for all the layers that exist within it.   I believe taxpayers should be looking more closely at each layer and ensure that it is taxpayers and the politicians that represent us that more closely direct the specifics we want we are willing to pay for:

• Canadian content creation:  I want to see more of this.  This means not only am I willing to have my tax money going towards content creation, but that I want the results to be available to me.  I don't use the services of broadcasting (OTA or via a BDU), so content that is only made available via broadcasting isn't made available to me.  As I wrote in my submission, public funding should be conditioned on wide public access.  This means being neutral on the wide variety of content distribution mechanisms and services.
• Domestic and foreign radio broadcasting:  This is the cheaper of the two types of broadcasting, both for transmission and reception.  This is an important way for Canadians domestically (especially in rural and remote areas), as well as abroad to get news from Canada.  Terrestrial audio radio is accessible in locations which can't be served by the Internet.
• Television broadcasting: I only believe in subsidizing television broadcasting in rural and remote areas not able to be adequately served by commercial broadcasters.

A proposal to add $318million more to CBC's budget to remove advertising from broadcasting doesn't sound appealing to me.  If we were talking about $318million more for Canadian content creation that would be accessible to me as an audience (public money conditioned on being neutral as far as content distribution systems) then I would be in favor.

Even if we were talking about transferring budgets away from television broadcasting to subsidize emerging content distribution as a policy tool to reduce copyright infringement, I would be in favor.

I don't see anything of value to me of making broadcast television ad-free.  It might make that broadcaster more competitive with online services that are paid for by subscribers rather than advertisers, but I think that is a very inappropriate abuse of public funding.  The last thing I want is my tax money funding a broadcaster which would think of online content libraries as a "competitor" (or some extremists claim "industrial dumper") and be denying me access to content which I partially funded.

A more future-facing proposal

 

I believe we should be creating structural separation between the major layers in the CBC.  Specifically, content creation would be structurally separated from any type of content distribution.

As part of that structural separation some of the money currently paid to the content distribution layer (the broadcaster) should be shifted to content creation.  I do not believe it is advertising that conflict with CBC's public interest mandate, but the conflict of interest that arises whenever content creation and content distribution are thought of as a bundle.

In markets where the broadcasting arm is seen as being in competition with commercial broadcasters, we really need to finally ask ourselves if a publicly funded content distribution service should be in that market at all.

And yes, it wouldn't make sense to call the Canadian Content Creation Corporation (CCCC?) the CBC any longer...

Heritage Minister and Department must reduce barriers between creators and audiences

While many participants in the "Canadian Content in a Digital World" consultations are focused on funding issues, real support is needed from the Minister of Canadian Heritage and the Department of Canadian Heritage to reduce barriers that exist between Canadian creators and their potential audiences.

While some people would prefer we all sit down and watched broadcast television like we did in the old days, the industry is moving forward in ways I discussed earlier in Canadian Content Creators harmed when Netflix claimed to be a "broadcaster". I noted how people are moving to online content libraries away from broadcasting. While this is a major improvement over broadcasting, there are still barriers between creators and their potential audiences.

While I can hope the Minister and Department will help, I also ask that they do no further harm. A number of policies that have been proposed previously, as well as some brought up during the consultations, put up more barriers rather than reducing them.


On Monday I had a short twitter exchange with Christopher White, writer and director of I Fall Down (2013), that is typical of the types of problems I see.

My #cdnfilm is now on Amazon Prime. 400+ M Potential audience. Didn't cost a $. There are no barriers. https://t.co/wlaGSTtCmC #DigiCanCon pic.twitter.com/9kUPehMz3Q

— Christopher White (@CWhite20XX) November 21, 2016

Lets pause here for a moment before we go down the rabbit hole.

This is a great-news story that this movie has been made available to a wide audience, without costing the creators anything for the additional publishing, and without needing to ask someone else's permission.  At this level of the conversation there really are no barriers, and I hope more creators will follow Mr. White in trying to make their content easily available.

I have heard great things about Amazon Prime video as far as ease of use and device compatibility. On the link Mr. White provided is a large list of devices which the video can be accessed with. While it didn't list all my devices, it is available on enough that I could access.

Well.. If only I didn't live in Canada that is.

While Amazon Video is available in the US, UK, Germany, Austria, India (soon) and Japan, it isn't available in Canada.

Except, of course, when you search for "Amazon Prime video Canada" you will get a good list of VPN services that will give you a US based Internet address to then access the service as if you lived in the United States.

This is another level of inconvenience which some users are willing to put up with, although because of pressure primarily from exclusive regional distributors (that's primarily Bell for Canadians) there has been a lot of attempts to block VPNs from Canadians trying to access services like US Netflix.

I don't for a moment believe this is a technical limitation, as Amazon adding the number of users that Canada represents to their service wouldn't be noticed as far as the increased load is concerned.

All I can believe is that there are regulatory barriers or other red-tape with dealing with Canadian governments, most likely policy under the jurisdiction of the Department of Canadian Heritage, that is in the way of this service being launched in Canada. Amazon has a Canadian subsidiary that provides many of the other retail and product shipping services that US Amazon does, but Amazon Prime for Canadians is currently a fixed fee service for faster shipping (I am a member, and much of what I buy is DVD video content).

Unfortunately, instead of working with Amazon to eradicate any barriers to allowing Canadians to easily purchase access to Mr. White's movie, DigiCanCon conversations have been in the opposite direction. There are those who want to put up barriers to anything they don't deem "Canadian" enough on the distribution side, ignoring the fact that the existing "Canadian" content distribution companies (largely owned by BDUs) have shown no interest in entering or competing in this marketplace.  The "Canadian" companies want to drive people backward to Cable, not offer services people (creators and their fans) want.

These people are fine using computers produced by companies not headquartered in Canada, and a host of other products and services with our Free Trade partners, and yet they expect content distribution platforms to be treated special.

Department of Heritage officials suggested that making the use of VPNs to cross-boarder shop for legal content should be made illegal.   This is the opposite to the types of policies Canadians need. Canada should be enacting and enforcing laws to ensure that online video distribution services are not allowed to region block any more than was previously done with DVDs.  Using VPNs to access US content delivery services should be made redundant by ensuring the same content is available equally on these services in both countries.

Back to Mr. White.  I mentioned that Amazon's video service isn't available in Canada, and asked if he considered Google Movies and TV (A service I now regularly use) as an alternative which does work in Canada:

@russellmcormond Have to go thru an aggregator ($1000+) for Google Play. Paid that to get it on iTunes Canada https://t.co/3BxsqDIsls

— Christopher White (@CWhite20XX) November 21, 2016

Just as Mr. White has to choose between different services to make his movie available on, there is a limit to the number of devices someone can own in their home to access content.   While I own many devices, none of them are compatible with iTunes.

While most video distribution services aren't owned by a hardware manufacturer, iTunes is and they have a tendency to try to tie the use of one of their products or services to another of their own products and services.  This means that the number of compatible devices is the lowest of any of the popular content distribution systems.

This should be my own business which devices I own, as long as I have one of the popular ones supported by the vast majority of services.  I do own a number of popular devices, and there are few video services that don't work on at least one of the devices I own, with services like YouTube and Netflix working on the most.

Since Apple is a popular brand within the arts community in North America, you sometimes get the surprised answer when they meet someone who isn't an Apple customer.

@russellmcormond You have a blog, Twitter account & specialize in hardware/software, but no access to iTunes?

— Christopher White (@CWhite20XX) November 21, 2016

I am someone active in technology law. I see software as the rules that a computer obeys, much like laws are the rules that humans obey. I believe that for the general public to understand software and software authors they need to make analogies between to policy and policy makers. It is not the field of engineering that is the closest example for understanding the impact of software on society, but political science.

For more, please read Lawrence Lessig's "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace."

I tried to shortcut this conversation on twitter by suggesting that saying "All I have to do is become an Apple customer" to access content comparable to saying "All I have to do is join CPC".

To which Mr. White replied:

@russellmcormond Not really. It's more like if you bought a Betamax rather than VHS & said there's no access to content.

— Christopher White (@CWhite20XX) November 21, 2016

And further down the rabbit hole we go :-)


To understand how to apply the Betamax example to technology used to access content distribution services we need to discuss the computer marketplace more closely.

Betamax was a proprietary format offered only by Sony, while the VHS technology was widely licensed to multiple vendors to create VHS recording, editing and playback devices.  Standard market forces applied, and it should be obvious when a single company tries to compete with a multi-vendor economy that the economy will win.

With computer technology the situation is more complex as there are a number of different markets involved.

The desktop computer market has stayed relatively stagnant between the late 1990's and now. Depending on how you count (and there are wide discrepancies) and if you broadly look over the entire period, you find about 70% run on Microsoft Windows (of a variety of flavors), about 10-15% on MacOS (a variety of flavors, older versions incompatible with new), and the remaining being "other" that included things like IBM's OS/2 in the 1990's and later some small inroads with a variety of Linux and Unix desktops.

In the Internet server space things are quite different.  What started as mostly the domain of Unix saw some growth of Microsoft Windows on the server, but the largest force became Linux which took over the vast majority of Unix and left Microsoft as a distant second rounded to around 10% with only a small fraction of "other".  As Microsoft is a big player in the server space with Microsoft Azure cloud services, this month they joined the Linux Foundation.

In the mobile space Apple took the early lead, but like Sony they didn't license their technology. Google built an operating system based on the Linux kernel called Android which it released fully Open Source.   While Google still leads the development of their version of Android, any company (or group of individuals) is able to build their own compatible version of Android, build their own applications and distribute without anyone's permission, as well as build any devices.

This is what Amazon did with the Amazon Fire product line, which is a stack built on Android that includes tablets and Amazon's own Appstore for Android that competes with Google Play's App store.

Set-top devices have taken a similar route as mobile, where Linux dominates and other environments are fighting for small percentages.  There is also a growing number of manufacturers building Netbooks that run ChromeOS.  While these devices are replacing desktops and laptops for some people, they fit more into the mobile space than the desktop/laptop space.

While some people still use desktops and laptops to access content, most will use mobile platforms to control streaming to things like a Chromecast (or a growing variety of similar devices), or set-top devices, connected to their television.


Applying the Betamax example it is clear that Apple is similar to Sony as Apple doesn't license their technology to third parties. The most openly licensed platforms are the Linux-based marketplaces.  While there are some niche markets where Apple is still the most visible, the global marketshare has Android above 80% with Apple's iOS retaining about 13%.  As this market matures many people are assuming that Apple's iOS will go the way of Betamax.

So, as far as Betamax vs VHS is concerned Mr. White got which-is-which backwards.

This is a level of detail of computer history, current marketplace analysis, and always uncertain marketplace predictions that Canadian content creators should never be expected to think about.  They should never be forced to choose between which audiences will be able to access their content, or have the risk of making the wrong choices between competing technologies/businesses/etc.

Can't all content delivery platforms be available on all devices?

We didn't pursue the conversation this far on Monday evening, but it is the next logical question.  Why does it matter what brand of device I purchased when accessing a content delivery platform?  It didn't matter what brand of TV I bought to watch TV, or what brand of radio.  What makes digital content delivery so different?

For this you need to know the history behind "encrypted media".

With the digital transition on the (some wished distant) horizon in the late 1980s and early 1990's the larger content industry players went to the larger technology companies and asked if they could do some technical thing to digitally encoded content such that it could be accessed by audiences who paid for it, but that it couldn't be copied.

Anyone with adequate technical knowledge knows this isn't possible, as a computer being able to access something means it is making copies in memory and other places -- accessing and making copies are the same thing, and if the computer owner decided to save a copy this was a legal and not a technical issue.

Unfortunately a few technology companies with ulterior motives offered what they convinced the content industries was an answer to their question. Two of the three most visible are familiar names: Apple, Macrovision and Sony.

What they proposed is that content would be encrypted such that you needed a decryption key to access the content, and then the key would be embedded within hardware and software where the manufacturer rather than the device owner was in control.  This was seen as a powerful business model by Apple and Sony who would not be selling general purpose computers which obeyed the commands of their owners, but "selling" devices that obeyed the manufacturers commands. (See:  Another meaning for DRM: Dishonest Relationship Misinformation) There is considerable benefit to the vendors to be able to do this, restricting features that would normally already exist and have the ability to sell those features back to the "owners". (See also: Perspectives on computer security and encryption from Apple, the FBI and I : Apple)

While there has yet to be any evidence that "encrypted media" reduces infringement, and considerable anecdotal evidence that it increases infringement, the proposal worked.  Many non-technical people don't even recognize that what the content industry likes to call "copy control" is actually "computer control" (IE: a question of whether the vendor or owner controls the computer).

Some people believe that content alone can make decisions, and don't understand how encrypted media impacts the computer control question. Digitally encoded content cannot make decisions any more than a paperback book can come alive and chase the reader around the room (I call this the "Harry Potter" understanding of encrypted media).

Many governments around the world have passed laws to legally protect what they call "technological measures", allowing Apple and Sony to point fingers at copyright holders and the law whenever someone complains about anti-owner restrictions on devices.   At the moment most copyright holders demand "encrypted media" be used for all content distribution services, forcing this on all content delivery platforms as well as all the devices that are legally allowed to access those services.

It is this encryption, and the requirement that the correct decryption keys be embedded in the device (hardware or software), that ties specific content delivery platforms to specific brands of devices. These are not technical limitations, but business model and legal limitations.   Nearly all audio and video these services distribute are in well understood common audio and video file formats which all devices can understand.

If not for this encryption, and the harmful laws that seemingly protect it, third party applications could be authored to make every popular content delivery platform compatible with every popular device.  It would only be the obscure platforms or obscure devices where authoring applications would be up to the device manufacturer or content delivery platform provider.



As a software author, my ability make a living is dependent on computer owners being able to make their own software choices in order for them to be able to choose my software.  If hardware manufacturers, rather than owners, make those choices then my livelihood is put at risk -- to a greater extent than any imaginable amount of copyright infringement could.  While this is obvious to me, the same risk exists for cultural creators as powerful hardware manufacturers and content delivery platforms may also dictate things to them (what their content can be about, how much they can charge, what audiences they are allowed to reach).


If you are concerned by these things, including believing that all content delivery platforms should work on all devices, you might do some of the things I have done including:

• I spent more than a decade starting from the summer of 2001 until the passage of Bill C-11 actively engaged in the Copyright revision process to ensure that politicians, other policy makers, and fellow creators know about policies threatening technology property rights
• I boycott the products and services of some of the most visible companies that sparked this problem, including Apple and Sony. Macrovision keeps changing their name to hide, likely because they are controversial even within the content industry.  This was no change for me when it comes to Apple which I had already been boycotting for other political and legal conflicts, but it was the end of my being a Sony customer.

I recognize my earlier analogy between Apple and a specific political party isn't a good one.  I've met many MPs in person, largely because of this area of policy, and they work together and have far more in common than the public political theater would suggest.  I believe MPs sitting in the House of Common across all political parties have far more political views in common than I have with Apple.

All of this is a legal and political controversy that Canadian content creators should not need to be aware of.  The Minister and Department of Canadian Heritage should be aware, and should be looking at all these issues to (wherever possible) reduce barriers to creators maximizing their potential audiences.

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If any Liberal MPs are reading this, the policy change to avoid the "encrypted media" problem is to tie anti-circumvention legislation to actual infringement, as well as only protecting "use controls" (as discussed in the WIPO treaties) and not "access controls".

This was the Liberal party position during the C-32/C-11 hearings.

If implemented correctly it would allow Canadian App developers to author compatibility applications, which along with laws to protect us from inappropriate region controls would go a long way to solving critical barriers Canadian content creators have in reaching Canadian and foreign audiences.