While Jeff's message conveyed his emotions, we can't make public policy based only on emotions. As angry as people get about copyright infringement, we need to talk about the actual harm of the problem being solved and the actual harm of the solutions being proposed.

The emotional language he used is part of a 200+ year old confusion which I've called the Jefferson Debate http://c11.ca/Jefferson_Debate since it was Thomas Jefferson who said on August 13, 1813:

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

While it is true that the government granted monopoly of Copyright can be bought and sold, making the monopoly a form of intangible property, it is simply false to analogise copyright infringement with theft. The thing which is owned, the government granted monopoly, does not change possession with infringement so even if we did consider it equivalent to tangible property infringement would not be theft. The closest analogy that can be made is to trespass, which is an unlawful activity with respect to property, but doesn't change possession.

Like trespass, some copyright infringement is economically harmful but it is wrong to claim that all infringement is economically harmful. Some infringement is as harmless as if a neighbour kid ran through your back yard to get to theirs. Some of the rhetoric from copyright holders sounds little different than a group of old guys yelling "get those damned kids off my lawn" : expecting the police to go arrest the kids (or their parents) for the alleged nasty wrong that was done to them.

Jeff also attributed blame on technology companies simply because their technology can be abused by someone else. If the problem is copyright infringement, then the target of the legislation should be copyright infringers. This has not been the case for the majority of copyright revision proposals tabled in recent decades. All this laying blame on everyone else, other than the copyright holders (who often make business decisions which induce infringement) or the copyright infringers will always receive strong push-back from innocent bystanders.

It is not a case of blaming the victim to attribute some infringement to the business decisions of copyright holders. In a normal business environment when someone doesn't like the way a product or service is offered, and don't buy it, nobody claims "theft". There are many copyrighted works that are not offered to Canadians (regional restrictions), not offered on the devices people own (misapplied technological protection measures), or not offered at all any more (the antiquated "out of print" problem which makes no sense in the modern age). When someone isn't offered the ability to pay, is it really wrong to then get so angry if they don't pay (even if they don't access the content at all)?

The reality is that the statistical models used to allege the harm from infringement do not adequately differentiate between people switching to alternatives and those infringing. See: http://c11.ca/4540

The ability to abuse technology exists for every technology that has ever been invented by humans. This blaming and seeking to punish the neutral provider of products and services appears to be unique to digital technology. If a road could be used by a getaway vehicle from a crime, we would never blame and seek to punish municipalities for "enabling" that crime. This is essentially what SOPA said of providers of communications services.

The same is true of the Paracopyright component of Bill C-11. As I said when I spoke in front of the Bill C-32 committee http://c11.ca/5293 :

"We would never legally protect non-owner locks to all guns in a country where many are uncomfortable with the mere registration of long guns. We would never legally protect non-owner locks on our homes, alleging it was necessary to protect the insurance industry from fraud. We would never legally protect non-owner locks on our cars, allegedly to ensure that automobiles could never be used as a getaway vehicle."

It is hard not to get emotional in these debates because the alleged "solutions" to copyright infringement seem far more comparable to "theft" than the copyright infringement itself. And at the end of the day there has never been evidence that these drastic measures reduce infringement, or increase revenues to copyright holders. In fact, much of the evidence suggests the opposite that these extreme measure induce infringement and reduce revenues to creators.

Great interview.

I believe work done by ietf.org , and its governance structure, was attributed to ICANN. IETF is the consensus governance around the technology, and ICANN focuses on the domain name system (DNS).

As the CEO of CIRA it is undertandable Byron is focused on DNS, with SOPA threatening the secure upgrade of DNS. An unamended Bill C-11 doesn't get involved in DNS, but it does harm other technology through legal protection for "technological mesures" which often involves locking technology owners out of what they own. Bill C-11 may also see amendments, and there have been push on the Canadian government to add SOPA-like policy within Bill C-11. We won't know how much worse C-11 will get for the Canadian economy until the final version is passed thrugh both houses. As it stands, the most controvercial part (TPMs) will harm not only technology owners, but the vast majority of copyright holders as well.

When I talk to people about the two locks of DRM (one on content to make it only interoperable with "authorised" devices, and one on devices to disallow the owner from making their own choices), the most common reaction I get is disbelief. They don't believe that this is how DRM works, and most truly believe that what these laws are talking about is "copy control" (some magic pixie dust you can put on content that allows it to come alive and make decisions on its own without the need of software running on computing hardware).

People presume that they can do with their computers any legal thing they want to. Many less technical people are convinced that these restrictions are defects in the device. This is one of the reasons why the "Defective by Design" campaign was named that way: to let people know that these defects are deliberate choices being imposed on them, not something accidentally broken on their computer.

I think once people realise how these restrictions work, they can then begin to ask the right question.

a) Should copyright holders have the right to impose brands of access technology? I suspect most believe that copyright holders should have as much say in their choice of digital technology as book authors had in what brand of eye glasses people wore.

b) Should someone other than the owner of something be allowed to place a lock on it where the owner is denied keys? I believe most people believe property law should protect us from this, and that denying keys from owners is far more analogous to "theft" than any type of copyright or related rights infringement.

Once we get to these simpler and more relevant questions, and away from the science-fiction "pixie dust" nonsense, we can enact laws which better reflect the expectations of the majority of citizens in our society.

At the moment, I don't believe that citizens or politicians are making informed choices about the content or devices they are purchasing, or the laws that are being tabled/passed.

BTW: I've been creating/repairing/programming/using computers since the mid 1980's. Various attempts at things marketed as "copy control" have been with us since that time. What is new since the mid 1990's is proposed radical changes to the law to grant legal protection for activities that if we were talking about non-digital property would be prohibited. It is sad, but politicians not understanding digital technology has enabled lobbiests to dupe them into passing laws which are backwards to how other technology and property are treated.

"The future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed" (William Gibson, and many others)

If you look at the worlds richest people they are primarily from sectors where governments have granted monopolies: telecommunications (spectrum, right-of-way), software+media (copyright+patents).

Rather than the efficiencies of the machine offering benefits to all citizens, the benefits largely went to those who were the primary beneficiaries of these government granted monopolies.

Is this failure a social sciences one (IE: government policies on spectrum, copyright, etc), or one that relates to the "machine"?

Nora has already covered many stores about how we become more productive in collaborative volunteer ways when we have more unallocated/leisure/free/libre time. We may not be working for an employer, but often when we are volunteering we are being even more productive participants in society than we are when at our "jobs".

Note: I negotiated an 80% rather than the 100% time that my employer wanted, so that I would have that 20% to do volunteer work. As much as I like my current job, I find contribution to society is far more in the 20% than the 80%.

Side-note: There is quite a bit of talk of the copyright/patent monopolies and alternatives. For those who haven't thought about the impact of spectrum monopolies, I've found http://www.apc.org/en/pubs/issue/openaccess/spect... contains a good primer.

It was suggested we crowd source some thoughts. While I hope to read the book in the future to better understand the argument, I haven't done so. Please take the comments in that light..

I'd like to offer an alternative theory to the reduction of jobs that we've seen in recent decades. I'm not saying my theory is the only one, but that it is likely part of the puzzle.

In the late 1980's and early 1990's Western governments decided to outsource manufacturing jobs to majority-world countries (India, China, etc) in exchange for stronger government granted monopolies on usage of the ideas that were behind the processes and expressions (Copyright, Patent, Trademark, industrial design, etc). The theory was that the "smart" people in western societies would come up with all the good ideas, and that the "large number of people" in other societies would build it all for us. They wouldn't be able to build things on their own because of the government granted monopolies on the basic knowledge building blocks upon which everything was built.

Half of this deal happened: manufacturing jobs were deliberately exported by western governments.

Then large portions of the world started to question these government granted monopolies, wondering if reduced-friction information sharing -- sometimes called peer production http://peerproduction.org -- was a better way to organize the further development of knowledge. From the growth of Free Software which dominates the mobile, server and cloud spaces to Wikipedia, open access science and educational material, and so-on. In fact, more and more people believe that thinking of each other as nodes in a network able to collaborate better is a better way to grow the economy than having governments grant monopolies on knowledge.

For a growing part of society, including here in the west, these monopolies are seen as friction on the economy. They see government policy which grants stronger monopolies as job killers. I happen to believe that Bill C-11 is a job-killing bill, and will make Canada less competitive compared to the majority-world BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China, etc) countries that we are competing with for jobs. The same is true of job-killing bills like SOPA in the USA.

Is it the machines we are competing against, or each other where government policies by western governments are killing our competitiveness? Money is a measure of comparative wealth between people, and whatever "jobs" exist that we will want to pay each other for will be filled by humans. I guess I don't see this as a race against machines but against backward-facing government policies where those who are able to better harness the machines are getting competitive advantage to those whose governments are creating barriers.

Remember: everyone equally making more money is called inflation, and everyone equally making less money is deflation. It is when one human extracts more money than other humans that things are interesting.

Thanks for covering this critically important issue.

North America's war against the general purpose computer could be seen as originating from the Clinton/Gore administration in the USA during their National Information Infrastructure task force. This is when I first heard of the idea that we should redesign general purpose computers and communications technology to somehow work and yet not allow its owners to do things which someone else didn't like. This idea was exported to the world through some policy laundering with the 1996 WIPO treaties, and showed up in Canada first as Bill C-60 under the then Liberal government.

When the Conservatives formed government in 2006 I mistakenly thought we had won that battle. These were people who supported those who were uncomfortable with the mere registration of long-guns, so there was no chance that they would support locking up our computers. I launched the Petition to protect IT Property Rights http://c11.ca/petition/ict , assuming I would get back a confirmation from the Conservatives that they would reject the Clinton/Gore/Liberal policy of abrogating responsibility for protecting the property rights of technology owners.

I was unfortunately wrong. I believe the problem is that non-technical people believe the marketing brochures from the TPM vendors. They believe it will reduce infringement, even though there is no evidence of this and considerable evidence that these TPMs increase infringement. Since they incorrectly believe that TPMs are something applied to content, rather than primarily something that is applied to devices, they don't realise the considerable harm to technology owners and competing technology vendors. Content alone cannot make decisions, and if any decision is made (including "copying") it is encoded as software running on a computer. Any TPM that alleges to restrict "copying" is in fact restricting the rights of technology owners to control the keys to any locks on their own property, and to make their own software choices.

I believe if studied it would be proven that legal protection for TPMs will cause far more harm to the economy (including to copyright holders) than the good that would be gained even if the marketing brochures were true.

It is frustrating that people who claim their motivations are to stop people infringing their copyright related rights believe that attacking the property rights of many more people is a valid option.

I hope Canadians will write their MPs and tell them to respect technology property rights. If hundreds of thousands of people signed the Petition to protect IT Property Rights http://c11.ca/petition/ict , we might get the attention of a government that claims to have respect for property rights as a founding principle.

Electoral reform has been an issue growing for decades, and it not about the current federal government. There has been large pushes provincially as well, and it was Liberal governments that IMHO messed things up for BC and Ontario. I joined Fair Vote Canada long before the federal Conservatives formed government, and it was the false-majorities of the federal Liberals that upset me when I joined.

I find it unfortunate that Fair Vote Canada has focused on party proportionality, rather than getting rid of vote-splitting and the antiquated First Past the Post voting system. I'm a bigger fan of ranked ballots (alternative vote, single transferable vote, BC STV, etc) than I am party proportional representation. Canadian federal political parties already have too much influence, with the Chretien and Harper governments being so centralized in the PM's office as to be questionable whether Canada is still a representative democracy. That said, I voted YES in the Ontario referendum for Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) which is far better than the current horse-and-buggy system we use now.

On this message: I'm a big fan of Charlie Angus, being one of the few sensible people on Copyright reform in the house (see http://c11.ca for my involvement). If he thinks Dewar is the right guy for the party, then I'll go along with that. But I'm not a partisan person, and see good ideas in all 4 of the federal parties with seats.

I like your line of questioning, and wish more people did it, but disagree with your specific conclusions.

I think you missed the part where he said the device had a battery within it, meaning it is already "Always On". We can discuss efficiencies of batteries vs capacitors as a temporary energy storage mechanism, but I think even with battery storage we are talking about a system far more efficient (Less complex, etc) than trying to tie into the electrical grid.

If anything, we should be creating a DC electrical system within our homes so we can have fewer devices that tie into the electrical grid (One efficient AC->DC power supply to replace the rest). The fact that so many devices are USB powered even suggests a type of plug to be using.

To go back to your suggestion, the electronics to synchronise the DC generated by solar with the phase of the AC electrical grid could easily itself be responsible for more waste and less efficiency than not having a battery in the device would (IE: not always being on).

I disagree with the centralisation inherent in your suggestion. The more devices we get off the grid and onto decentralised power, the better for everyone (except maybe the utility companies, but I don't factor their economic interests into this).

(Cue the engineers to insert some of the numbers and latest research!)

I have an ASUS transformer+keyboard which has two batteries (one in tablet component, one in keyboard component) which is what makes it last so long. I often charge my Nexus One phone from the ASUS. I find with this type of tablet/etc I'm not using my much more power hungry desktop as often, which is a great power saving.

Thought not mentioned in interview: If we continue to increase our consumption without moving to renewables/etc, we are likely to experience load shedding like other countries. Having devices independently powered not only allows for things like solar chargers (that don't have to be plugged into the devices themselves), but also means we're less reliant on what will likely become a less reliable power grid.

BTW: great interview -- listening to full show later, but listened to the interview earlier as part of your feed.

Online voting is essentially a proxy vote system where we are (often blindly) trusting technology companies to return accurate vote results for those people who voted using that technology.

It doesn't need to have everyone using the technology in order to change the outcome of the election. Many ridings are decided based on only a few percentages of votes. A corrupt supplier of technology only needs to manipulate the proxies that flow through them in a small way in order to change election outcomes.

I don't think we should assume that online voting will increase voter turnout. Some people may decide based on this new proxy voting influence to not bother voting, given their votes won't impact the elections as much as the proxies will.