ACTA: How can Prentice be so short sighted?

I know that not many people read this blog. It's really a place for me to vent, more than anything else, since there is little that I can do, personally.

I have already emailed my local Member of Parliament the following:

Dear MP:

I am very concerned about this article I read in the paper today:
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/story.html?id=ae997868-220b-4dae-bf4f-47f6fc96ce5e

I have been following the copyright laws in Canada for some time now and have been concerned about the direction Mr. Prentice seems to be taking on this issue. His latest proposal does not consider the rights of citizens such as myself and seems to be very biased (unfairly so) towards American interests.

Under current legislation, I am a law abiding citizen. I have an ipod. I have a blog. I participate in various activities on the internet, all of which are legal in Canada (and other first world nations.) The introduction of this bill seeks to treat me like a criminal first and has not been given adequate public attention or review. Please Hedy, there are thousands of us in your riding who will all be negatively impacted by this bill. Please be our voice and at least raise questions or vocalize our concerns. This issue is of primary importance to those of us who live and work with these technologies.

For more information and some background material, you can look at a website maintained by one of Canada’s leading legal minds in this area: Michael Geist. His website can be found here: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/

Thanks for your attention. I have purposely kept this message brief. If you have any questions, feel free to respond to this email

I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

I am putting this up in case someone else is casting about the internet looking for examples of what to say to one's government representative. Mine is probably not the best example and I am in no way experienced in these matters. But if my spoonfeeding gets one or two additional people to raise awareness of their concern to their local government, maybe others in office will start to take this proposed bill more seriously.

Others have had more meaningful things to say about this proposed bill - I suggest following the title link for a concise writeup on it.

Problem displaying Album art on the ipod touch

I really regret not taking a picture of this when it happened, but recently I added an album to my ipod (The very best of Elvis Costello) and after doing so, every album inherited the Elvis cover art. Now this particular album does not have the most flattering picture of EC, so I was interested in correcting this problem. When I looked in iTunes, everything was normal there, so I tried to sort it out myself. After a little trial and error, I noticed that if I did the following, I could correct the problem:
* view the ipod-bound playlist
* sort by album view
* Get info on the first (or any) track, select the Artwork tab (iTunes remembers your selection for next time)
* Select the artwork (click on it) and then copy it to the clipboard (press CTRL-C in windows)
* Return to the Album view and select all of the tracks in the album you just grabbed artwork for
* Right click and choose Get Info again - this time it is for the group of tracks which brings up a different screen.
* Click on the Artwork input box and paste the art into it (CTRL-V to paste in Windows)
* When you click the OK button from here, iTunes will reprocess these songs and the next time you sync, this album art will appear correctly on the ipod.

I had to do this for each album, so I also took some time to clean up the files a bit - for example, my Elvis Costello collection came in as separate albums for most of the tracks because it is a compilation album spanning most of his work. By providing too much detail such as the album a song was originally released on, iTunes thought it was best to separate these into different albums. By making the Artist and Album fields consistent (and blanking out the Album Artist field) these tracks finally appeared as a single album and not as a dozen or so.

My music collection is not all that large, so this was a workable solution for me. If someone had hundreds of albums, I could see this being a chore too big to handle in this way, and in fact, there very well may be a simpler solution. This worked for me and only took me about half an hour to complete.

UPDATE: It really bugged me not having a photo of the display problem, so here is a photo of what it looks like after I corrected things.

Posting from the iPod touch

Every now and then I come back to Blogger to see if I can make a post from the touch yet. It is one of those things that should 'just work' but clearly doesn't yet. Well here goes, let's see if this typing exercise was just for practice. It seems I can enter text if I switch the view to 'edit HTML' but not on 'Compose'. Still, this is better than nothing. 'barely works' is not as good as 'just works' but is better than 'just barely works'. OK I'll stop now

Canadian DMCA delayed. yay.

so, I followed Dave's directions in the previous blog post, and wrote an email to my MP. and I was very impressed when my MP, Libby Davies, replied to me basically saying,

"The NDP is committed to working with all stakeholders to ensure that artists receive fair remuneration for their work. But we must not blindly accept restrictive copyright legislation that could be used to quash the development of new digital distribution models, sue kids who share music files and impose tollbooths on the educational use of the Internet. There are no simple answers to this very complex issue..."

So when I got an invite to join a facebook group for the same cause, I figured I wouldn't join for a couple reasons:
a) I already wrote my MP, that was bound to be more effective than some fb group; and
b) I think I'm done joining random facebook groups.

And today, I read this article. What do ya know? That article gives the impression that facebook mobs are more influential than a good old fashioned letter to your MP. Then again, there are almost 16000 members in that facebook group vs. the 2361 people that sent the form-email to their MPs.

what have I learned from this? you want something done in Canada? bully your ministers with facebook groups. stay tuned for the facebook group "Free Gas for all 1967 Chargers in Canada"

Jailbreak the ipod touch - go to real jail?

The Canadian government is at it again, putting forward another bill that will restrict our rights and freedoms in favour of the record labels. As usual, Michael Geist has a lot of important information on what is going on, and also what you can do about it.

BoingBoing is also carrying this story (God bless their souls) and in some ways they put it best: (The proposed laws)... will contain an "anti-circumvention" clause that prohibits breaking the locks off your music and movies in order to move them to new devices or watch them after the company that made them goes out of business... with no exceptions to the ban on circumvention, not even for parody, fair dealing, time shifting, or other legal uses.

Let's break this down: our office recently got ipod touches. About half of the people here have already performed the jailbreak hack to open up their devices. That alone would now be against the law, even if all they ever did was install a few freeware applications, or God forbid, they wrote their own programs to use on this 'little computer called ipod.'

If you read this, please - write your Member of Parliament. Here is a handy link to find their contact info and remember - a physical letter is worth millions of emails to these guys. Since it is going to the government, postage is paid too, so no 'I'm to cheap to afford a stamp' excuses. For the really lazy, the govt actually provides a point and click method of putting together a memo to your MP. Thanks again to M. Geist for showing me those links.

This isn't law yet. We can still use our voice to indicate the preference of the people to our representatives.

Canada to get DMCA style laws?

I may have to contact my local politician to let him know that I would rather this bill not be passed.

Highlights from the linked article:

In particular, the report makes the following recommendations:

• ratify the WIPO Internet treaties (seemingly because the U.S. has placed us on the Special 301 list)
• increase damages and penalties under the Copyright Act
• create a new offence for the distribution of pirated works
• create a new offence for the manufacture or distribution of circumvention devices for commercial gain
• create new administrative penalties for the importation of counterfeit and pirated goods
• create a new criminal offence for manufacturing, reproducing, importing, distributing, and selling counterfeit goods
• strengthen civil remedies for counterfeiting and piracy infringement
• increase the resources allocated to the RCMP and Justice to counter counterfeiting and piracy
• prioritize RCMP and Justice copyright enforcement
• encourage prosecutors to seek more significant penalties for counterfeiting and piracy violations, including imprisonment
• create a new IP Crime Task Force
• new border measures, data sharing, and the creation of an IP registry

Now what I want to know, if this comes into play, does this mean the levy on recordable media gets lifted? And if so, what about the media I purchased prior to then?

CPCC wants the ipod tax back?

Bottom line: if I buy a CD, I am legally entitled to put this music on my ipod, hard drive, cell phone, etc. The artist was paid when I bought the CD. Putting a levy on an ipod, or other portable media players basically means I will be paying twice.

This does not even consider the fact that there are all sorts of reasons why one would use an ipod for purposes other than recording unpurchased music. My wife uses hers to play back podcasts quite extensively - podcasts that are freely distributed and that have nothing to do with music. Peter Jackson and his film crew used them as an effective way to transport video footage from a set to the director because the ultra portability made ipods the best device. Oh yeah, one other scenario comes to mind: putting my purchased CD collection onto my portable media player for the purposes of listening to legal music, where the artist was in fact rewarded for their efforts when I bought their CD. Tell me - how many times should an artist be paid for their work? This is not about a 'free ride' as they claim. This is about double dipping into the consumer's wallet.