Last week, I had the pleasure of delivering talks in Vancouver and Edmonton that reflected on the last year and the Canadian battle over copyright reform. A podcast of the Vancouver talk has been posted online.
Update: A podcast of the Edmonton talk is now also available.
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 200: Colin Bennett on the EU’s Surprising Adequacy Finding on Canadian Privacy Law 
Debating the Online Harms Act: Insights from Two Recent Panels on Bill C-63 
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 199: Boris Bytensky on the Criminal Code Reforms in the Online Harms Act 
AI Spending is Not an AI Strategy: Why the Government’s Artificial Intelligence Plan Avoids the Hard Governance Questions 
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 198: Richard Moon on the Return of the Section 13 Hate Speech Provision in the Online Harms Act
Michael Geist
mgeist@uottawa.ca
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to download or not to download
This kind of nonsense is really annoying– they don’t give a url to download from, but the url of a script that demands membership in something or other. But they will let you listen online. Right. How does that work again? The player *downloads* the audio and plays it. So they want you to be able to listen, but only if you have time to do so right now! WTF? So you copy the url out of the player and download that; or find the cache file.
I mean for gods sake– if they don’t want people listening to it just don’t put the damn thing online. And if they do, then make it simple and stop being so annoying.
Read my lips: playing a digital file means *having a copy*. Buy a new calendar, already. It’s 2008.
You can stream the file without registering.
To download, you have to register. To register is free.
That’s ok– I downloaded it without registering. That’s my point– what they did is inconvenient, but blocks nothing. They merely force an extra step or two to find the url. Waste of time.
@Maupassant: They’re not doing that to stop you from downloading the MP3. They’re just trying to make the process easier for Registered users than for Un-Registered users. This provides incentive for users to register (like nag-ware).
What benefit they get from having users register, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s part of a targeted advertising campaign!
The site was created to allow non-commercial radio producers to exchange their work with other Canadian radio stations. By registering, producers then know which radio stations are downloading their work for broadcast purposes. It just so happens that the public can access it too! Emails are not collected for any advertising purposes.