n: vb: the spice of imagination
I’ve just discovered that a photo of twelve year old me walking through the Endowment Lands with my little brother Mark has been used as a life sized cross Canada promotional poster for a pro-logging coalition to promote logging of old-growth forests “by showing that second-growth forests can be enjoyed too”.
I never signed a release and I doubt my mother did either nor did my mother. Does anyone know if there’s anything I can do to fight this?
Government of Canada to Table Bill to Amend the Copyright Act: “OTTAWA, June 11, 2008 — The Honourable Jim Prentice, Minister of Industry, and the Honourable Josée Verner, Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and Official Languages, and Minister for La Francophonie, will deliver brief statements and answer media inquiries shortly after the tabling of a bill to amend the Copyright Act. Members of the media will also be able to attend a technical briefing and lock-up prior to the tabling of the bill to amend the Copyright Act.”
from Corey Doctorow via bOINGbOING, (emphasis mine):
Here it is, folks, at long last: Industry Canada Minister Jim Prentice is about to introduce his Canadian version of America’s disastrous Digital Millennium Copyright Act tomorrow. In so doing, he is violating his own party’s promise to seek public consultation on all treaty accession bills, he’s ignoring the cries of rightsholders, industry, educators, artists, librarians, citizens’ rights groups, legal scholars and pretty much everyone with a stake in this, except the US Trade Representative and the US Ambassador, who, apparently, have had ample opportunity to chat with the Minister and give him his marching orders.
Watch this space [the bOINGbOING post – jh] — we’ll have all kinds of ways for you to call your MP, the Minister’s office, and everyone else with a say in this sordid, ugly sellout. In 1998, the US bill criminalized the majority of American net-users at the stroke of a pen with a bill that cost tens of thousands of downloaders their life’s savings, allowed the entertainment industry to destroy innovative companies and devices, and did not reduced infringement or pay a single artist. Ten years of this misery and absurdity, ten years of trying to make the Internet worse at copying, and all it’s done is drive a rift between customers and musicians and allowed the music industry to piss away the business opportunity of a lifetime with lawsuits and saber-rattling.
Canada can do better. Certainly, it can’t possibly do any worse — unless men like Prentice continue to make law without allowing Canadians to get a say in it.
UPDATE: Turns out the proposed Canadian DMCA is worse than the American one.
Someone scraped the contents of Darren Di Lieto’s website and published it into a 350-page book being sold online for $100. via warren.
This book — which reprints without permission several dozen artist interviews which Darren had posted on the LCS blog — transcribes these interviews word-for-word, including the artwork, and was “published” under the title “Colorful Illustrations 93°C”. The book even includes a CD with all the illustrations from the book, all lifted off the site as well.
Publishers have faked their details, resellers refuse to pull the book. The ISBN they provide is also a fake. It being nigh impossible to track down the culprits, (they seem to be located in HK, a city world renowned for copyright infringement), the only real way to shut these people down and/or make sure no one works with them again is to spread the word, create an information backlash and rub their faces in the muck so hard they’ll never get clean.
First, please re-distribute this blog post or Darren’s original post. Repost the whole thing, or part of it, in your blog, with links and tags included.
Next, use whatever social networks and news sharing sites you use every day — Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, Magnolia, Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook — to spread the word about this overpriced book full of plagiarized and stolen content. Feel free to quote us, and remember to also include the same keywords and tags in your posts.
There’s more information on Darren’s blog as well as a gallery of photos taken of every page.
from bOINGbOING:
The Canadian Recording Industry Association (which represents multinational, US, and other non-Canadian record labels exclusively) has come out against the “private copying levy,” a tax on blank media that it lobbied hard for over the past 15 years. The levy is charged against blank media, and the money raised is paid to copyright holders in exchange for the right to copy music and other works onto the media. CRIA apparently fears that the levy can be used to legalize P2P music-trading in Canada (an activity whose legality is in dispute right now), thereby breaking the P2P deadlock, decriminalizing millions of music fans, and paying millions of dollars to their members. The record industry giants would prefer to go on suing music fans and technology companies — an activity that pays the record companies handsomely, while encouraging fans to defect from buying music in the future, and which does not pay one cent to any artist.
“The Canadian Recording Industry Association this week quietly filed documents in the Federal Court of Appeal that will likely shock many in the industry. CRIA, which spent more than 15 years lobbying for the creation of the private copying levy, is now fighting to eliminate the application of the levy on the Apple iPod since it believes that the Copyright Board of Canada’s recent decision to allow a proposed tariff on iPods to proceed “broadens the scope of the private copying exception to avoid making illegal file sharers liable for infringement.”
Given that CRIA’s members collect millions from the private copying levy, the decision to oppose its expansion may come as a surprise. Yet the move reflects a reality that CRIA has previously been loath to acknowledge – the Copyright Board has developed jurisprudence that provides a strong argument that downloading music on peer-to-peer networks is lawful in Canada. Indeed, CRIA President Graham Henderson provides a roadmap for the argument in his affidavit:
“First, the Board has stated, in obiter dicta, on several occasions that the Private Copying regime legalizes copying for the private use of the person making the copy, regardless of whether the source is non-infringing or not. Therefore, according to the Board, downloading an infringing track from the Internet is not infringing, as long as the downloaded copy is made onto an ‘audio recording medium’…”