Prentice Plans to Rush Copyright Bill Through Parliament

C-61, the all-new copyright bill has finally landed: and despite Industry Canada's spin, it contains all the worse provisions of the DMCA. Our companion site, Copyright For Canadians has letters to write and info you can use to warn your MP that this is not a bill they should rubber-stamp.

Track the new Copyright Bill with Copyright For Canadians

The revolt over the government's secretive and unsure approach to tabling new copyright reform has spread across the Canadian Net in a matter of days, and every hour seems to gain even more momentum. To help you keep track of all that's going on, Online Rights Canada has launched a separate mini-site, Copyright For Canadians. We will, of course, be running our petitions, factfiles and action center activities here: but for a quick summary of news and reactions from across all of Canada's concerned groups and citizens, you might want to add Copyright For Canadians to your RSS newsreader or bookmark list.

Countdown to a New Copyright Bill

There are strong indications that, sometime in the next two weeks, Industry Minister Jim Prentice will introduce the Conservative's version of a new copyright bill. The word is that it be terrible step backward for Canadian copyright reform. It will contain a wholesale importing of the United States' dismal DMCA anti-circumvention regulations, with no new exceptions for parody or other "fair use" limitations and exceptions, and no fix for private copying or the levy. It's as though United States and major rightsholder lobbyists wrote a laundry list of wants, and the Conservatives were happy to hand it to them. We await the proposed language with concern, but in the meantime, write to your MP now, and urge them to take Canadian copyright into the 21st Century, not mimic the last decade of intellectual property missteps from the United States.

Lawful Access Consultation Goes Public at Last

As you may have read in the press or online, Public Safety Canada and Industry Canada recently launched a consultation on Lawful Access: how and when telecommunication companies (including ISPs) should hand over customer names and addresses to law enforcement.

To call this a "public" consultation would be stretching it: the document was only passed around a limited number of stakeholders, and the government initially refused to allow it to be posted online. Its existence was not published in the Canada Gazette as is normally the case, and interested parties were only given until September 27 to make their comments. Within it, the departments hint that law enforcement should have access to personal information without a court order or other judicial checks.

The good news is that Public Safety Canada has now had an apparent change of heart - about the consultation, at least. The document has now been placed online, and the deadline for public comment extended by three weeks to October 12.

If you would like to make your voice heard, just follow the instructions provided by Public Safety, and let them know exactly how you feel.

Blogger Posts Riding Data, Eases Access to MPs

When we first looked into building a tool to help people write to their MPs, it seemed like a relatively straightforward task. And from a technical standpoint, it was. All you have to do is match a person's postal code to an electoral riding, then slap some code on the front to make it pretty. But the data that links postal codes to electoral ridings is only available from Statistics Canada, and they charge thousands of dollars to those who want to use it.

We wondered why should people have to pay for uncopyrighted -- even *uncopyrightable* -- data about who belongs in which electoral riding. That information has enormous value to the public, which could use tools built by non-governmental organizations to easily contact their MPs about important issues.

Apparently, Quebec blogger danieljohn felt the same way, and he has posted the whole database online. We hope that Stats Canada will take his cue and post their own copy of the data for everyone to use.