A post of Copyright Bill C-61 has been floating around the web for some time now and to be honest, I’m not too sure if I find it useful to anybody. If  we look at what Jim Prentice had to say about it, the Industry Minister has stated you get this:

“Our government has committed to ensuring Canada’s copyright law is up-to-date, and today we are delivering by introducing this ‘made-in-Canada’ bill that balances the interests of Canadians who use digital technology and those who create content”

And, so… basically we can copy legally acquired music, television shows, ebooks, photographs and movies to digital devices like iPods and the like. Call me crazy, but that’s what I thought people were already doing for years, now. I know I have. Although, I have to admit that the “timeshifting” term is a bit silly. I mean, the whole idea is that you’re temporarily saving a recording of a program that you can view at a time that fits your schedule better. Jesus, we’ve been doing this exact same thing since the personal videocassette recorder and VHS tapes were introduced the public. Why is this even an issue now? just because it’s being saved sooner and to a hard drive instead of a spool of tape?

Actually, I imagine that it’s because you could rip these saved videos and throw them up on all sorts of legally questionable websites.

This bill does have an air of positivity and a lot of it is spun in such a way to make us feel that we’re gaining all manners of new freedoms that haven’t been addressed before, but at the end of the day, the gist I can derive out of the bill is to allow Canadians the ability to copy and save and store digital media in their own libraries at home and to move them to portable digital devices and players with enough freedom to match what would be the equivalent to a creative commons licence…  unless it has had some form of DRM on it when you bought it. And giving content producers and providers enough of a heads-up to put DRM on anything and everything.

This doesn’t give balance to anyone. It is turning this whole situation into the same stupid cat & mouse game we’ve already had to deal with, just with a newer rulebook. And none of the major rules had changed.

So, I’ve had my hands on an iPad for about two and a half weeks now. It may not sound like the biggest deal in the world, but I live in Canada and the iPad isn’t bound for release up here for a few more weeks. (no I didn’t run to the states to pick it up.)

My first impressions were that it’s a very fancy web surfing machine that is, actually, quite nice to bum around the web on. You get a very “Minority Report” vibe from some of the ways you can interact with it. The size is actually kind of…  sort of, halfway large once you get it in your hands and start using it. I use a 13-inch screen laptop 75% of the time and I somehow feel I get the same amount of screen real-estate in some strange way. But, that’s all about the usability of the device, itself. It’s a device designed by Jonathan Ive, it was always going to look amazing and be nice to use and none of that was ever really in question. To doubt Ive’s design capacity would be like saying that Valve Software is working on an A-list gaming title and it is somehow suspect to flopping.

The big thing that has kept me using it every spare few minutes I have is the alternate, more subversive implied use for this device that I think is going to really open up a whole side of modern day digitization. It’s the way you can view and subscribe to content that was normally only available in print or awkward websites. I’m talking about Magazines, Newspapers, Journals and the like. This thing could very well be the digital answer that print has been looking for. Because, lets face it: print is dying. Publishing a Newspaper or Magazine this day in age is a very, very, difficult space to be in right now and you even hint that there is some kind of reliable future in that space is just laughable.

A lot of the tech-aware Mags and Papers have made a serious effort to move online and have at least a digital end with a website or a mobile app or, in some rare cases, a desktop client or email newsletter on the extremely lazy end. But, the younger publications that have emerged from this new digital era of shared media have pretty much embraced the web and digital distribution out of the necessity or constraints of the internet. These publications are just now breaking the threshold of being respectable sources of information and often can operate and compete on a platform with traditional print media and can how stand shoulder to shoulder with old printed companies and say with complete confidence: “This is a digital age. Our industry is about to erupt into a large digital model and we should have, nay, NEED to have a proper, full featured device to experience our content on. It’s worked for video and especially for music. We need to get our act together.”

I’ve played with a Kindle and I’ve seen many reviews of Sony’s ereader and they all seem to have the shortcomings of the mobile market pre-iphone. All they do is read books. Like, novels, not mags or papers. And I honestly think that novels are going to stay fairly comfortable in the physical medium. Novels are a bit of a niche market to begin with and almost every last customer in that space loves their books. They love the feel, the smell, the weight and the way the form walls in a collection. I don’t think that has any shot of changing any time soon, or at least in the next ten years until some radical new way to READ a book is presented.

But magazines? I have a box of mags in my brother’s closet that him and I will never touch again. I do not regret spending money on them and on many issues of Keyboard Player, Computer Music and Electronic Musician I am really glad I parted with the ten dollars to explore the information put in there by the writers and editors of that title. But once you read an issue, the paper becomes a waste of space. It always has and would continue to be if it weren’t for the recent efforts to build a device to carry this kind of content. In full colour with dynamic, imbedded media and contextual linkage on a device small enough to put into a backpack or carry bag, but big enough to hold on your lap and read like a modest sized magazine.

The iPad is going to be the little black & silver rectangle that will sit on your coffee table that you will pick up like you would the newspaper or a magazine and flip through stories and articles like you would do normally, but there’s nothing to waste or throw away while the same content providers you enjoyed in print would continue to thrive and deliver you the same quality content you have come to enjoy. Or, at least they will, if they’re smart.

I know this because that’s exactly what I’ve been doing with this thing for two and a half weeks. I go to my desk during lunch, throw down my sandwich, take a sip of my coffe and then flick on the iPad and launch the Digg App and read magazine articles.  (and also read comics from Marvel’s comic reader app, that, I cannot say enough good things about. it is a JOY to use. I could write a whole post just about that little piece of software. If you haven’t given it a go, I suggest that you do.)

Oh yeah, and this thing does all the other stuff the iPhone does, too. And that’s turned out to be a bit of a half-way successful feature-set.

LISTEN TO ME

I wiggle my mouse, letting a laser sensor detect movement and send small electrical impulses down a copper cable via the universal serial bus into the front of my Apple PowerMac G5 where two IBM built PowerPC 970MP processors detect that movement and jolt to life together in unison, propelling my desktop computer to 2.0GHz per processor as it cycles through billions of calculations a second to frantically run the UNIX foundation that supports Mac OS X as a platform that flexes it’s muscles and hosts Core Audio that can detect my M-Audio audio interface over the universal serial bus and supply the electricity needed to not only power that input/output interface, but supply the extra 45 volts down it’s cable to my Nova where it powers the electronics and diaphragm of the microphone so it can receive and interpret sound pressure levels emitted by my Marshall Valvestate S80 amplifier who listens for the signals made by my Gibson SG guitar.

Where my hand and pic grazes the strings of it that vibrate at different frequencies depending on where I restrain those strings on various points along the guitar’s fretboard. the dual, plated humbucker pickups below the strings sense those strings vibrations with electromagnets wrapped in copper coil that generate small electrical signals that are routed inside the guitar, being coloured by the density of the wood and the coil of the strings as they pass through volume and tone filters that I could control with my hands with knobs on the face of the instrument and zaps on out through a 1/4 inch cable into my solid-state amplifier where those signals are sent through semiconductor circuits that use a combination of valve and solid-state technologies that create a unique overdriven sound and route it out to a pair of 12 inch speakers in a cabinet that continue to shape the sound before it expels outward as waves of particles and energy through the air and collides with my Nova microphone where it is then converted once more into electrical energy and is blasted down, through my I/O’s analog to digital converters that change electrical signals to digital information so my Macintosh’s Core Audio engine can read those packets of information and allow Logic Studio to route and record that information to my hard drives that are spinning at 7200 revolutions per minute.

All of this happens behind a graphical interface that allows me to modify, warp, change those recordings into a coherent “mix” where the guitars are spread out over a wide stereo spectrum and it’s harmonic content controlled with multi-band equalization so that the drum kit, who is a interface and algorithm with over 20,000 different samples of a given drum kit that interprets how I play my midi controller into different drum recordings, in real-time, to arrange different percussion patterns can eventually get mixed and summed with the recordings of my guitars in a mathematical algorithm where it is then converted, compressed and saved as an individual MPEG-Layer-3 coded file that I then upload over the TC/IP network that spans the entire fucking globe to a website that I own and run for a small-as-shit fee, so that anyone on the infinitely accessible internet can decide if they have the time to listen to what I had just spent the time creating or read what I had just self-published. for free.

EVERYONE.

everyone takes everything for granted, all the time.

and as much as I find the possibilities of what can be done with our technology inspiring and truly amazing.. I find it sad and very disheartening that nobody knows that it’s there. or what it actually does. or the effort it took to get it to where it is. or that they can do these kinds of things if they took the time to look into it.

the great scourge of the information age. I’ve tried many times to express why I feel piracy is so important, and I think I may have hit a nerve:

Piracy, right now, is important because it makes it difficult to make money in media. and that’s important. because by making it harder to cut a living in multimedia, it forcefully weeds out the entities that have no interest the medium as art, but as a source of income.

think of it like a human body in the grips of a fever: it is forcefully making it’s own body uninhabitable so it can drive out malicious agents.

that’s essentially my personal take on priacy and how it should be seen as a natural reaction to the *LACK* of a competitive marketplace since the 1970’s.

and it’s my opinion that this is only really at a start and has a lot farther to go and a lot more damage to do before things even begin to solidify.

So I’ve  moved back into the city, this week. It’s been a long, long time since I had a place to live where the high-rises of downtown Vancouver were something I could look out over my balcony and marvel at. In fact, it was the apartment on Haro St with my Dad, would be the last time that happened.

I’ve since had a place in White Rock, and two in Burnaby and…  they never really felt quite, completely right. Granted, my bachelor pad I just moved out of was brilliant but that’s probably because I was truly self-sufficient and on my own for the first real time. No room-mates, no family, just me and myself and however I could make ends meet. I completely recommend just diving out on your own with no extensive plan or experience and just getting a small, cheap apartment and going at it by yourself for a while. Completely. The freedom, is delicious.

BUT, I’m back in the city and it’s about time I got down to work. You can expect to hear some singing from me and a friend of mine in the next few months, and you can expect the drum kit and electric guitar will most likely be left out of the equation. Once I get a new mic stand… since the one I have doesn’t hold the Nova quite right…

In any event, here’s a thing I did the other night, inspired by all of this. Hope you like it:

Untitled Idea  by  Dizavin

Over the past few months the government of Canada is holding a national forum to try and get a feel for what it’s citizens think of the current state of copyright in our country. Even though initially I thought this was a brilliant opportunity, our representatives seem to value the opinions of big business more than taxpayers with the trends swinging over to support implied draconian copyright law extensions and imposing a DMCA clone. 

Though, as citizens, there is something you can do about it if you don’t agree with that notion. (something tells me that most don’t)  The Canadian Coalition for Electronic Rights or CCER have a letter template and submission form that you can use and even customize to write your opinion on the matter and it will email and snail-mail your letter to the Copyright Consultations administrator, Tony Clement, James Moore, Marc Garneau, Pablo Rodriguez, Charlie Angus and Stephen Harper. 

I wrote my own and sent it in. I would suggest that you do, as well.

So it seems that almost none of the required funds that Global Gaming Factory needs in order to buy The Pirate Bay have been raised thus far. This, to be honest, isn’t shaping up to be a great situation for file sharers and fans of The Pirate Bay. The way the TPB staff are going to be able to pay off their legal expenditures and fines, is obviously going to be way of selling the site. But the only interested buyer can’t get the money and the clock seems to be ticking. In an interview Wayne Rosso has been quoted to say: 

“We decided that we’re not going risk our reputation further. The more time we spent with Mr. Pandeya, the less confident we were. I don’t think there’s going to be any money raised with GGF’s current plans.”

And when confronted with the news, Pirate Bay founders have been said to arrogantly state that GGF have a week to raise the necessary funds or “the deal is off”. You see, to me that seems like a very slippery stance to take when you’re piled down with legal debts and the only real way out is to sell your site. I really don’t think they should be so picky about who is willing to buy that site as, if one were to ask me, isn’t actually worth much of anything. I mean, yeah it’s an internet icon, but it’s core foundation is based on distributing content that they don’t own the copyright to. In all actuality, it’s probably going to cost you out-of-pocket to run that site and anything you pay for it is going to be an enormous loss. That is, unless you have an idea that can take a user-base of media consumers that aren’t willing to pay for content under the guise of bootlegging and be able to draw an income from it behind the scenes, with the risk of 75 – 90 % of the users migrating away from your site on the sole fact that you are a new owner. If the kids over that The Pirate Bay were really serious about paying off their legal debt, they’d be sharpening their pencils every damn day for a buyer dumb enough to invest in a bombshell that’s past her prime. 

It’s not looking good, out there.

Some large discussion has been happening lately on the fact The Pirate Bay sold last week to a company called Global Gaming Factory X. This is pretty big news as the icons of file-sharing on the web seemed to give in to the force of financial woes related to their recent trial. With The Pirate Bay seeming to pull a Napster and legit media sales on the horizon, the open source community of The ‘Bay are furious. Demands for a system to deactivate accounts and separate all ties to The Pirate Bay are coming at the site admin in large numbers, unrelenting. To the average person, it would seem that the good ol’ days are over and the sun might actually be setting over at The ‘Bay. 

But I have a different take on the whole situation. Yes, this could be the end of www.thepiratebay.org as we know it… but in a recent interview Rasmus Fleischer points out a very interesting fact: 

The web site that the visitor of the domain is directed to could be said to be ownable, in the sense that any new owner can change its contents. But it is also copyable, meaning that the “original” version can pop up again at another domain name. Actually, it is very simple to copy. You can fit all of The Pirate Bay, including the software and every torrent, on a USB stick.

A single USB stick, you say? that’s small. that’s really small. In fact, I’d say it’s small enough to easily be made into a .torrent file and put up on the web to be distributed at whim. So, with that in mind, I get the sneaking suspicion that a backup of the site will flood the internet if the previous owners aren’t happy with the way the new owners are running it. That’s if they don’t just let the dog off the chain right off the bat. 

Just imagine that after all this strife and struggle and law to put a leash & collar on The Pirate Bay…  All the money, effort and controversy that’s lead up to this point when the IFPI, MPAA and RIAA have thrown resources at it like the world was about to end and struggled to emerge victorious and start to feel the relief that The Pirate Bay is about to close it’s doors?  Imagine that overnight, 5 to 50 to 500 to 5000 more Pirate Bay Clones show up, every last one of them identical in capacity and functionality to the original Pirate Bay, all sharing the same trackers and databases. 

Copy & Paste. Such a simple concept, but so infinitely versatile when put into practice. People need to realize that once you let something loose into the web, it’s going to exist and migrate from user to user in an organic and unstoppable way that I don’t think that the world has actually realized is possible, yet.

Germany is on the verge of possibly censoring it’s internet access for all german citizens this coming week. This is a touchy slope as the main intent of the movement is to block out access to child pornography from reaching the hard drives inside Germany, witch is a worthy cause to get behind, but the problem I have with censoring the web is that the unavoidable bottom line is that censoring the only free publishing medium that the public can use is a dangerous thing and the only way to really avoid the risk of having the line of ‘what can be forcefully censored’ being pushed further into people freedoms of expression and free speech is to not censor at all.

This is a sticky situation. But I’m against it.