The War Between Old Media Empires and the Internet

It is now clear that the true enemy of traditional media, still unbloodied, is the Internet itself. The remarkable ability of digital technology to reduce the transaction costs of information exchanges of all kinds has destroyed the business models, if not the businesses, on which content providers have operated successfully since at least the 18th century. That’s when the first copyright law was passed in England.

The focus on “media” in the very name of the industry belies its reliance on the limited life of physical copies as the key control mechanism. But as physical copies are replaced by faster, better, and cheaper digital alternatives, control becomes more illusory. The entrenched providers are growing desperate.

- Larry Downes, in his recent, and somewhat lengthy, column Leahy’s Protect IP Act: Why Internet content wars will never end Read the rest of this entry »

Potential Effect of Digital Locks on Music Industry Clouds

Since Bill C-32, an Act to amend the Copyright Act, died with the election, the new Tory majority government had promised in their campaign to reintroduce and pass the same bill, albeit with a new number, in the next Parliament. It is unclear what, if any, changes will be made to C-32 upon reintroduction. Read the rest of this entry »

Into Stormy Clouds

With its many virtues, more and more organizations, both public and private, are heading into the clouds, and not the precipitous, atmospheric variety. Cloud computing provides new ways of doing business for the likes of Cisco, Xerox, Amazon (Amazon Cloud Player) and especially Google (like Google Docs and most recently Google Music Beta), and enables new products like Dropbox, Flickr and WordPress.  Small businesses have also cropped up using the cloud, including Canada’s Asigra, Freshbooks and Boardsuite. Even government agencies are getting on board, as nearly half of American federal agencies plan on being in the cloud within 12 months, according to an InformationWeek Analytics survey. Read the rest of this entry »

Class-Action-Proofing Boilerplates

These days, products or services often come with lengthy, legalese-heavy, finely printed set of standardized terms many of us are not aware of, have no say in, or if we are aware of fine print, few understand them. Many people hardly ever read the standardized terms that come with our cell phone contracts, iTunes products, insurance agreements or other agreements consumers are effectively forced to sign in order to obtain goods and services. Read the rest of this entry »

US “Privacy Bill of Rights” Proposal

The Federal Trade Commission, consumer advocates, and some legislators have been considering online privacy for years, but the issue has been increasingly in the forefront. The FTC released a “Do Not Track” Proposal in December, and several media sources have focused on the issue recently. The Wall Street Journal ran a series last summer entitled “What They Know”, which revealed that many websites install tracking tools on users’ computers Read the rest of this entry »

Digital locks and ownership

The anti-circumvention, or digital lock, provisions are arguably the most controversial aspect of Bill C-32. Arguments on both sides of the debate dominate the dicussion of the proposed amendments to the Copyright Act. In this article, I suggest a different way of looking at the problem of technological protection measures and an approach to legal protection of digital locks on content that respects user expectations while leaving substantial control to copyright holders.

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Usage-based billing controversy continues

The Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology met again last week to discuss and review concerns surrounding usage-based billing. The decision granted by the CRTC has been met with strong opposition from Industry Minister Tony Clement, with Prime Minister Stephen Harper also taking the unusual step of intervening in the ever-mounting debate of Internet billing. Read the rest of this entry »

The Private market in online privacy services and the emergence of data as an asset class

One of the most common concerns arising out of the use of the internet is privacy. The use and interaction with online materials provides opportunities for marketers to surreptitiously collect data and sell it to advertisers looking to target certain consumer groups. Read the rest of this entry »

Trade negotiations with EU poised to increase drug costs in Canada

As explained in this article by the CBC, a recent study, commissioned by the Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association (CGPA), has found that proposed changes to Canada’s drug patent system suggested by the European Union as part of trade negotiations would add billions of dollars per year to Canada’s prescription drug plan.

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Publishers and pirates: an editorial

In anticipation of the upcoming TIP group conference on copyright reform, it seems worthwhile to look at some of the complexities and nuances of copyright and the challenges it poses, situated within the context of the larger debate.

What is ostensibly one of the core issues in copyright can be found in what has been popularly depicted as the need for balance, between creators’ rights on the one hand, and users’ rights on the other. But in certain key ways, this kind of framing is misleading. Read the rest of this entry »