Columns

Opening Up to Canada’s Innovation Potential

The Hill Times ran a special section this week on innovation policy (Hill Times version as full PDF, homepage version) that included a contribution from me about the need to free government data and embrace open access for federally funded research as part of that strategy. I note that last […]

November 8, 2007 — Comments are Disabled — Columns

How the Internet On Cable Became the Internet as Cable

When Rogers Communications began promoting its Rogers@Home high-speed Internet service nearly a decade ago, the company branded it "the Internet on Cable." My weekly column (Toronto Star version, homepage version, Ottawa Citizen version, Tyee version) notes that years later, their service, as well as those of their competitors, is gradually morphing into "the Internet as Cable" as broadcasters, Internet service providers, and cultural groups steadily move toward the delivery of content online that bears a striking resemblance to the conventional cable model.

While cable television has its virtues – some consumer choice, the ability to time shift programs by recording them with a VCR or PVR, and video on-demand offerings – it is largely premised on limited consumer control. Cable distributors determine channel choices, geographic distribution, and commercial substitution (with input from the broadcast regulator), offer only limited interactivity, and quietly even possess the ability to stop consumers from recording some programs.

Until recently, the Internet was precisely the opposite, offering unlimited user choice, continuous interactivity, and technological capabilities to copy and remix content. That is gradually changing as broadcasters seek to re-assert greater geographic control over their content, ISPs experiment with cable-like models for prioritized content delivery, and some creator groups lobby the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission to adapt Canadian content regulations to the Internet.

November 7, 2007 — 1 comment — Columns

Music Publisher’s Takedown Strikes The Wrong Chord

My weekly law and technology column (Toronto Star version, Tyee version, homepage version, BBC version) focuses on the recent battle over the IMSLP. In February 2006, a part-time Canadian music student established a modest, non-commercial website that used collaborative wiki tools, such as those used by Wikipedia, to create an online library of public domain musical scores. Within a matter of months, the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) featured over 1,000 musical scores for which the copyright had expired in Canada. Nineteen months later – without any funding, sponsorship or promotion – the site had become the largest public domain music score library on the Internet, generating a million hits per day, featuring over 15,000 scores by over 1,000 composers, and adding 2,000 new scores each month.

Eleven days ago, the IMSLP disappeared from the Internet. Universal Edition, an Austrian music publisher, retained a Toronto law firm to demand that the site block European users from accessing certain works and from adding new scores for which the copyright had not expired in Europe. The company noted that while the music scores entered the public domain in Canada fifty years after a composer’s death, Europe's copyright term is twenty years longer.

The legal demand led to many sleepless nights as the student struggled with the prospect of liability for activity that is perfectly lawful in Canada.

October 30, 2007 — 10 comments — Columns

The Telecom Takeover of Canada’s Do-Not-Call List

My weekly technology column (Toronto Star version, Ottawa Citizen version, homepage version) focuses on the quiet telecom takeover of the forthcoming national do-not-call list. In the past few months, the do-not-call list details have begun to emerge with the CRTC addressing questions surrounding who will run the list, who will pay for it, and who will investigate consumer complaints. While Canadians might expect most of those responsibilities to rest with the CRTC, the Commission appears to have a far different vision – one that involves a near-complete outsourcing of responsibilities to Canada’s dominant telecommunications companies.

The CRTC was never particularly supportive of the do-not-call list. Indeed, Charles Dalfen, the former CRTC chair, told the Canadian Press in 2004 that a do-not-call list was a good idea, but that the Commission "isn't equipped to administer such a list and doesn't have the power to enforce it properly." Consistent with that perspective, the CRTC has sketched out a system where the do-not-call list would be maintained by a non-governmental entity and paid for primarily by businesses that engage in telemarketing. Complaints would be investigated by the newly-created telecom company-backed complaints commission.

This system has elicited considerable opposition from some marketing, financial, and charitable groups, yet the telecom companies are unsurprisingly supportive since they are literally poised to run the entire operation from registration to investigation.

October 22, 2007 — 2 comments — Columns

Music Industry Needs Dose Of Innovation, Not Intervention

My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, Ottawa Citizen version, The Tyee version, homepage version) focuses on the contrast between artists such as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails that are adopting new distribution models, and the recording industry, which continues to lobby for anti-circumvention legislation. In the weeks leading up to today's Speech from the Throne, CRIA and others lobby groups have urged the government to prioritize intellectual property protection.

While the data suggests that peer-to-peer file sharing is at best only a minor reason for the decline (more significant is competition from DVD and video game sales and the emergence of big box retailers such as Wal-Mart who have pushed down retail prices and decimated sales of older titles), events over the past month have provided the clearest indication yet that musicians and music sellers are charting a new course that is leaving the major record labels behind.

In the mid-1990s, the industry focused on retaining its core business model by emphasizing two strategies. First, it relied on copy-control technologies, supported by additional legal measures, to curtail unauthorized copying. Second, it lobbied for the establishment of a private copying levy on blank media to compensate for the copying that technology could not control.

Ten years later, that strategy is now in tatters.

October 16, 2007 — 7 comments — Columns