Michael Geist

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The Daily Digital Lock Dissenter, Day 37: British Columbia Teachers’ Federation

The British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF), established in 1917, is the union of professionals representing 41,000 public school teachers in the province of British Columbia, Canada. All public school teachers belong to the BCTF and their local teachers’ association. The BCTF provided a submission to the 2009 national copyright consultation and said the following on digital locks:

Including a provision that prohibits the unlocking of content from anticircumvention features is particularly a threat to libraries – school as well as public libraries. Users (teachers, librarians, or individuals) should have the right to access resources that they intend to use within the copyright provisions.

Telling potential users that they can use material, appropriately, and then putting a roadblock in the way of actually accessing the material, makes a sham of recognizing the rights of users. Again, the public interest requires that libraries, in particular, be able to offer access to people who do not have the personal resources to access important materials – materials that contribute to their roles as citizens and as participants in the Canadian economy.

November 24, 2011 — Comments are Disabled — News

ECJ Rules Courts Cannot Order ISPs to Block File Sharing

The European Court of Justice has issued a crucial ruling on Internet freedoms, concluding that national courts are not permitted to order ISPs to block file sharing activities. The court stated that “the filtering system would also be liable to infringe the fundamental rights of its customers, namely their right […]

November 24, 2011 — 2 comments — News

Dutch Parliament Refuses ACTA Secrecy

The Dutch Parliament has set the standard for how countries should address the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. It is refusing to even consider the agreement until all ACTA negotiation texts are published.

November 24, 2011 — 6 comments — News

CRTC Releases Do-Not-Call Report

The CRTC has released a report on the functioning of the do-not-call list. The report notes that there were 103,890 prima facie valid complaints during the reporting period. The Commission initiated 197 investigations.

November 24, 2011 — 3 comments — News

The UBB Decision Aftermath: Is the Pricing a Killer?

My column this week on the positive aspects of the CRTC’s usage based billing decision has generated some sharp disagreement, with some arguing that the pricing set by the Commission is faulty and virtually guaranteed to increase consumer prices (Search Engine covers the issue and arrives at the same conclusion, Peter Nowak does as well). The column pointed to the pricing concerns, but I think it is worth exploring the issue a bit further.

Questions about network costs are notoriously difficult to pin down. Earlier this year, I published a report that attempted to estimate the cost of a gigabyte of data and others have tried to do the same. The data relied upon by the CRTC is all subject to confidentiality and there have been concerns raised about its validity by both the independent ISPs and the incumbents (groups such as CIPPIC asked the CRTC to reconsider the issue of pricing in one of its interventions but the Commission declined). We should be clear – the lack of transparency associated with the numbers is a significant problem and must be addressed.

That said, I fear that part of the problem stems from years of limited Canadian competition with little innovation in the variety of broadband plans and services.

November 23, 2011 — 32 comments — News