More than 500 Canadian art professionals have formed a new coalition to call on the government to take a balanced approach to copyright reform. Appropriation Art: A Coalition of Arts Professionals, includes arts organizations from Alberta, BC, Quebec, Ontario, and Saskatchewan along with hundreds of artists from across Canada. The remarkable list features the President of Carfac Ontario and winners of numerous art awards including eight Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts.
The group identifies three issues in their letter to Ministers Oda and Bernier: fair access, certainty of access for creative purposes through a fair use provision, and no support for anti-circumvention legislation. There is something very exciting happening here: musicians, privacy groups, students, and now artists are standing together against anti-circumvention legislation and for balanced copyright. These are voices that until now have been missing from the copyright reform debate. With their active involvement, they have affirmed that the DMCA-like provisions have little to do with support for creators or creativity. Rather, they are provisions designed to support a small cadre of largely foreign-backed industry groups without representing the real needs of Canada's own artistic and cultural communities. It is time for the government to listen to its own artists, who are forcefully speaking in their own name.
IEEE artical “Death By DMCA”
Here is a interesting artical from IEE Spectum
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/3673
That many I would hope to read.
To see the foolishness of DMCA type Laws
curious
I hope my question is relevant to this topic…
I’m looking over AC’s 2005 annual report, in which they emphasize their struggle to represent creators, who they say often rely upon distribution payments for a big chunk of their income.
I’m wondering how much of AC’s payments actually make it their way? Does anyone know the formula?
Looking over the report, the number of creators (7650) dwarfs the number of publishers (618).
Unfortunately, they do not organize their payment information along these same lines: they go according to genre.
(Textbooks receive 37% of the distribution—from experience I know that the authors rarely own rights to texts developped by big, multinational publishers like Pearson Education.)
How can one find out whether creators benefit as much their publishers? Or how much AC pays out to foreigners?