Archive for November 18th, 2011

Wind Mobile Founder: No Political Will For Telecom Competition

Wind Mobile founder Naguib Sawiris is in the news today for comments about his regret of investing in Canada and frustration with the government’s commitment to competition. Sawiris says “there’s no real political will here to introduce competition into this closed market” adding that he won’t bid on in the […]

Read more ›

November 18, 2011 3 comments News

Lawful Access Could Close Smaller ISPs

IT World Canada reports on ISP regulation at the Canadian ISP Summit (I was panelist) where Chris Tacit, who acts from the Canadian Network Operators Consortium, indicated that the costs associated with implementing lawful access could cause some smaller operators to close up shop.

Read more ›

November 18, 2011 5 comments News

The Daily Digital Lock Dissenter, Day 33: City of Vancouver Archives

The City of Vancouver Archives is the oldest municipal archives in Canada. Included in their holdings are over 2,100 linear metres of textual records, 1.5 million photographs, 36,000 maps, plans and architectural drawings, and tens of thousands of digital records. The City of Vancouver Archives stated the following on digital locks in its copyright consultation submission:

Archives frequently need to undertake actions that could be considered infringing in order to preserve works, conserve a damaged work, and otherwise manage their holdings. This is particularly relevant in the case of digital works, where the inherent fragility of these works makes it regularly necessary to create back-up copies of works, to migrate works to new physical media because of hardware obsolescence, and to migrate works to new logical formats because of software obsolescence in order to prevent them from being lost or becoming inaccessible.

If a work is protected by encryption or other technical protection measures (TPMs) it may be necessary to circumvent these measures in order to be able to back-up, conserve or preserve a work. Circumvention of TPMs for these purposes should not be an infringement. Finally, it is not only archives and cultural institutions that need to undertake these actions, but all persons who own these types of works. Because of this, this exception should not be limited to only archives, libraries and museums – it should be a general exception.

Read more ›

November 18, 2011 4 comments News