Michael Geist

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An Open Letter to Harper on Fair Use

Meera Nair has crafted an excellent open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper urging the government to implement a fair use provision in the Copyright Act.

June 3, 2011 — 1 comment — News

Media Piracy Roundtable Coming to Ottawa

IDRC is hosting an open event in Ottawa on Friday, June 3rd on the Media Piracy in Emerging Economies study it funded. I will be participating along with Joe Karaganis, the lead editor of the study, and Ronaldo Lemos, the Director of the Center for Technology and Society at FGV […]

June 2, 2011 — 9 comments — News

Cabinet Minister Mandate Letters for The Digital Era

With the new Parliamentary session set to kick off today with the election of a new speaker, new cabinet members are busy brushing up on the myriad of issues they will face in the coming months. The appointment to cabinet comes with a private mandate letter from the Prime Minister that sets out his expectations and policy goals. If Canadians focused on digital policies were given the chance to draft their own mandate letters, my weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) speculates that they might say the following:

Christian Paradis, Minister of Industry: As the new Minister of Industry, it falls to you to make the digital economy strategy initiated by your predecessor Tony Clement a reality. The centrepiece of the strategy should be universal, competitively priced broadband service. With a majority government in place, we have four years to open the market to new competitors, facilitate the introduction of new wireless broadband alternatives, encourage the market to offer fibre connections in all major markets, foster new local competitors, leverage the role of high speed research and education networks, consider using spectrum auction proceeds to fund broadband initiatives, and address anti-competitive pricing models. We should set realistic but ambitious targets for broadband speed, pricing, and competition that allows Canada to reverse a decade of decline and once again become a global leader.

June 2, 2011 — 1 comment — Columns

Staying the Course: The Real Significance of the Paradis Digital Economy Speech

Christian Paradis delivered his first public speech yesterday as Industry Minister at the Canadian Telecom Summit. The media and attendees may have been hoping for a sense of the Paradis perspective on many digital economy issues (telecom, foreign ownership, spectrum, digital economy strategy, copyright), but what they got was a very slightly modified version of former Industry Minister Tony Clement’s digital economy speech from November 2010. That includes the government’s yet to be fully articulated position on telecom foreign investment and the forthcoming spectrum auction.

Several reports from the speech have focused on these telecom issues, suggesting that government is sounding “more ambiguous and indefinite” on telecom foreign investment. I don’t see it – the government has been saying the same thing for months. For example, the Globe points to this comment from Paradis calling for a:

predictable regulatory framework that ensures an appropriate balance between competition and investment

as evidence that lobbying from incumbents has had an impact on Conservative thinking.

June 1, 2011 — 3 comments — News

Access Copyright Responds: So Much For Getting the Facts Straight

Access Copyright has posted a two-page response to my recent series of blog postings (transactional licensing, economics of the collective, future reforms, all three posts in single PDF) titled “Let’s Get the Facts Straight on Access Copyright.” Unfortunately, as has become typical for an organization that based its advocacy strategy on Bill C-32 on misleading claims about fair dealing in an effort to “break through” beyond talk of digital locks and levies, the document contains very few facts to address its transparency and financial concerns.

The key post in my series involved a look at the economics of Access Copyright with the goal of ascertaining how much of the revenue collected in 2010 was distributed to Canadian authors. Those numbers should be easy to find, but they are not. Access Copyright points to its total distribution in 2010, which was $23.3 million. Yet this does not set the record straight. First, this global amount was distributed to all publishers and authors, both Canadian and foreign. Second, this figure draws from both the 2010 revenues and the balance entering the year, which stood at $29.5 million. How much of the 2010 distribution came from 2010 revenues? How much went to Canadian authors? Access Copyright still isn’t saying.

May 31, 2011 — 28 comments — News