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FIGHT FOR YOUR (COPY)RIGHT | Protecting Canadians right to media content

Did you know that it’s illegal to rip your own (legally purchased) CDs to your IPod in Canada? That’s right—it’s copyright infringement. Welcome to the sometimes-strange and complicated world of Canadian copyright law.

Copyright is set to become more complicated still if certain industries and lobby groups succeed in influencing the federal government’s copyright reform bill that will likely be tabled shortly after Parliament resumes on Jan. 28. All signs point to a copyright act that will cater to the demands of large content owners: music, movie, and publishing companies otherwise known collectively as “Big Content,” while criminalizing common activities and allowing consumer interests to be trampled in the name of anti-piracy.

It is expected that the big changes to the Copyright Act will be related to technologies that Big Content believes are the major cause of piracy and lost revenues. From photocopiers and VCRs to iPods and BitTorrent, technology has made it easier to use content, exercise fair dealing rights (“fair use” is the American equivalent), and to infringe copyright. To guard against infringement (and fair dealing), Big Content companies have taken a two-pronged approach: adding digital locks (digital rights management, or DRM) to their content and lobbying for laws to make it illegal to circumvent these locks.

These digital locks are objectionable in their own right because they allow Big Content to dictate terms of use for digital content that would be unreasonable for their real-world counterparts. For example, can you imagine not being able to sell or lend a book or CD after buying it? However, when coupled with legislation that outlaws the circumvention of these locks for any purpose, a very troublesome situation arises. Suddenly, even if a user is able to bypass the locks protecting content and intends to for legitimate purposes only, they are legally barred from doing so. It doesn’t matter if they wish to exercise their fair-dealing rights on protected content or if they need to access the locked content they purchased after the holder of the “keys” has gone out of business—all of these activities become illegal.

Such Draconian legislation would certainly upset the balance of rights that is central to copyright law in Canada. While some creators and most Big Content companies and lobby groups believe that protection of their economic interests is the sole purpose of copyright, others (including the Canadian Supreme Court) view copyright as a balance of rights: creators should have the right to compensation for creating new content (a public good), but the public should have the right to reasonably use this content that becomes part of our collective culture. Any new copyright law must maintain this balance.

We can learn about the effects of unbalanced copyright law by observing the nearly 10 years of experience of the United States with their Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Introduced to support content industries in the face of new technology, the DMCA has been ineffective in curbing piracy, yet has restricted user rights, allowed abuse by monopolistic content owners, and enabled ridiculous legal judgments against individuals downloading a CD’s worth of songs—all features that we should be loath to import into Canada’s copyright act. Instead, we must call for fair copyright law that addresses copyright problems while maintaining the balance between owner and user rights.

And what about that illegal music ripped from your CDs to your IPod? You probably won’t ever be arrested because of it, but it highlights the other side of fair copyright: the need for copyright changes to legalize clearly reasonable activity. There are a number of areas in the current Copyright Act that should be adjusted to provide exceptions for reasonable activity in our increasingly digital culture. Again, we must call upon our government to address these areas to ensure that copyright law is fair and accommodating of common consumer activities.

So, what can you do to ensure that Canada adopts fair and balanced copyright law? You need to let your government know that fair copyright is important to you. Start by joining Fair Copyright for Canada (Faircopyrightforcanada.ca), a group of citizens from all areas of society that oppose restrictive copyright law and support fair copyright for all Canadians. This national group and its local chapters are leading the charge against the anticipated copyright changes. They can help you take action to let the government know about the need for fair copyright, including writing, e-mailing, and meeting with your member of parliament, as well as encouraging others to learn more and speak out against unbalanced copyright law.

Canadians cannot remain idle and ignore copyright as another inconsequential law being tinkered with by bureaucrats in Ottawa. Copyright plays a fundamental role in how we interact with the elements that make up our collective culture, such as music, artwork, photographs, video, film, and written works. We must stand up for fair copyright law that maintains a balance between owner and user rights. Otherwise, we risk allowing Big Content to dictate how, and at what cost, we may access the content that defines our culture.

Steve Woodrow is the Fair Copyright for Canada Winnipeg Chapter organizer and an engineering graduate.

It’s a book, a collection of papers covered in ink printing and bound together, the kind of thing Mr. Vonnegut wrote to bring the ideas from within his head to the masses. This book in this particular image is called Breakfast of Champions.

As I’m falling asleep now, I have to call it quits for the night, but I’ll be sure to write more about the book when I’m done.

ETA: Excuse the rough drawing — that’s the best I could muster on my trackpad, and it’s no felt marker.

It was quite an exciting “last hundred metres,” as the book improved significantly and hit home for both of us when it shifted to discussing engineering education. Vicente really hit the nail on the head about where engineering schools need to head in the future to produce engineers that design technology with an affinity for human nature, helping to improve our quality of life in an increasingly technological world by reducing the “bad fit” that often exists between people and technology.

It’s quite encouraging, so I wanted to share it with everyone. There it is below, in all its glory. And no, I didn’t type it out.

From Kim Vicente’s The Human Factor, Random House Publishing, pp. 302-305:

Finally, universities can also contribute by taking a critical look at technical education. Since I’m an engineering professor, I’ll concentrate on engineering education. Most designers focus on technology because engineering curricula are largely still based on a Mechanistic world view. Students learn about thermodynamics, materials science, calculus, linear algebra, chemistry, physics, electrical circuits. All these topics are important; our planes wouldn’t fly and our bridges wouldn’t stand without them. But, as I’ve tried to show, these skills aren’t enough any more. The Human-tech Revolution doesn’t do away with the need for technical competence; designing to fit the physical world is critical. It just asks that we go beyond technical excellence, that we look at the interaction between people and technology. And, surprising as it may be, most engineering students are never taught to do that. They graduate without having taken a single course in designing for people. They join the workforce without being skilled in Human-tech thinking. They live in a Mechanistic world where they literally can’t see incompatibilities between people and technology. The best and the brightest may overcome these educational deficiencies and learn the value of Human-tech thinking from practical experience, but most don’t. And they wind up designing very impressive technical widgets that most people use with difficulty, if at all.

The impact of educational change is slow, but all engineers need to know that it’s possible to design technology that has an affinity with human nature. They need to know that there are systematic methods for achieving that goal, and that those methods have been proven to make a difference. They need to know the tremendous negative consequences of focusing on technical details alone. Mind you, that doesn’t mean that all engineers should become Human-tech experts. That’s not realistic, nor desirable for that matter. But they do need to know that attention to the interaction between people and technology is a crucial part of good design and that there are experts who specialize in that area.

It doesn’t take much, actually. For example, almost every engineering undergraduate is required to take one course in engineering economic analysis. That doesn’t make these students expert accountants or economists; specialists will always be needed. But taking the course exposes students to the relevance of economic factors to project management, and engineers are required to take it because, no matter what the industry, every engineering project has a budget: you simply can’t avoid economic considerations. The very same argument applies to the human factor: every engineering project involves interaction between technology and people somewhere along the way. Yet there’s currently no requirement that I know of for all engineers to be exposed to these considerations.

I also believe that, in the long run, making this kind of change to engineering education would result in tremendous — possibly surprising — benefits. Right now, engineering tends to attract people who are born Mechanistic thinkers — technologically clever, but somewhat narrow in their interests. Most of them are men. A lot of students who are just as good at the technical details but also have broad interests don’t go into engineering, or if they do, don’t stick with it, because they think it will be boring to spend four years taking only math, science and technical courses. These students are at least as bright as the ones who do currently go into and stay in engineering. They too have excellent high school grades, especially in maths and sciences. But they have wide interests. They can write a proper English sentence. They can speak clearly and convincingly. They’re heavily involved in extracurricular activities. They have good people skills. They read newspapers. They’re leaders. They want to learn about history, psychology, politics, sociology and other courses that don’t currently have a place in the rigid and overly prescriptive engineering curricula. These students — ones that we’re currently losing to other disciplines — would make outstanding engineers and precious leaders in society. They’re born Human-tech thinkers. Many of them are women.

By putting more emphasis on Human-tech thinking we would be graduating better engineers. Technical skills are essential, sure, but many of society’s problems demand a broader view, and many of the students we graduate are ill prepared for the challenges that await them. They wind up perpetuating rather than solving our societal problems. And the students who bypass engineering and become leaders often don’t have the knowledge or the skills they need to tackle society’s important problems — many of which are technological in nature, given the degree to which technology is becoming central to so many critical sectors, and not just at the physical level, but at the level of organizations and political systems too. Most people in leadership positions in government, for instance, have no technical background at all; many are graduates of law, politics or business. (Can you name one prominent politician who has an engineering degree? Answer: Jimmy Carter.) Today’s leaders find their way into positions of power and influence because they have a good sense of history, context, people and organizations — knowledge that is absolutely essential in making public policy decisions. But it’s clear that many of society’s problems today also require a knowledge of technology. Do you think that politicians without any technical knowledge are in the best position to make life-critical decisions about the safety of our water, for instance, let alone nuclear or environmental decisions? Society needs a new breed of leader — one that is as comfortable with differential equations and computers as with human psychology and politics.