Reports are beginning to come in from those who attended today's Jim Prentice Open House. There are some photos and comments at the Facebook group. Feel free to add your experience in the comments and many thanks to all those who took the time to share their concerns with the […]
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Calling in Your Regrets on the Canadian DMCA
Cory Doctorow points to an event being organized on Facebook to meet with Industry Minister Jim Prentice at his open house in Calgary on Saturday. If you are in Calgary, the open house runs from 1:00 to 3:00 pm on Saturday, December 8th at 1318 Centre Street NE, Suite 105. […]
Anti-Canadian DMCA Momentum Begins to Build
The Canadian DMCA may not be introduced until next week (Tuesday is the rumoured day), but many are not waiting until the bill comes to make their views known. Over the past few days, there has been an incredible amount of action and growing media coverage. This includes: Letters to […]
The Canadian DMCA: What You Can Do
With the Canadian version of the DMCA likely to be introduced within the next two weeks, there has a remarkable outpouring of interest from individual Canadians about what they can do to have their concerns heard. The unfortunate reality is that there is nothing can be done about what the bill will look like when it is introduced – Industry Minister Jim Prentice has simply decided discard consumer, education, research, and privacy interests, ignore his own party's policy platform, and the cave into U.S. pressure. Once the bill is introduced, however, Canadians can send a message to their MPs, the Ministers, and others, calling for a fair copyright bill that addresses Canadian concerns (those in Calgary can do so in person on December 8th as Prentice hosts an open house).
Many people have pointed to the my 30 Things You Can Do posting. I've decided to update the posting – and create a short YouTube video – to better reflect the current situation. I've also launched a Facebook group called Fair Copyright. The next 60 days are absolutely crucial. If Canadians speak out in large numbers, the government may rethink its current strategy of fast-tracking the Canadian DMCA.
What can you do?
Getting Social Networks to Socialize
My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, Ottawa Citizen version, homepage version) focuses on the lack of interoperability between social networking sites. While not quite spam, the steady stream of requests for Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, Dopplr travellers, or Plaxo contact updates, highlights the lack of interoperability between social network sites and significantly undermines their usefulness.
The interoperability issue is likely to become more prominent in the months ahead as hundreds of specialty social networking sites covering virtually every area of interest from dogs to cooking, jostle for new users. In fact, services such as Ning now enable anyone to create their own social network site. The result is that Internet users are repeatedly required to re-enter their personal information for each new network they join and find that each network is effectively a "walled garden", where the benefits of the network are artificially limited by the inability to link a friend in Facebook with one in MySpace.
These limitations are particularly striking when viewed from a global perspective. While Facebook is a leader in Canada (as well as in the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Norway), nearly a dozen other sites hold leadership positions in other countries. These include:
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