Perfect

True North from Canada writes: Thieves. I had to pay this levy to reproduce my own music - I was making a CD of music composed and performed by myself as Christmas gifts to friends. When I asked the CPCC, quoted in this article and who who also collects this levy, if they are able to charge me fees for reproducing my own music under the Copyright Act of Canada they would not give me a straight answer nor provide me with an exemption process from their scheme.

It is very clear under the Copyright Act that I, as the creator of my work, am most certainly entitled to freely reproduce my work yet the CPCC provides no process whatsoever for independent musicians and composers.

This levy is simply set up as a cash cow for the big music industry; not musicians and composers for in age of home studios and the internet, the big music industry is simply a bloodsucker. I am paying the music industry to put my own music independently and getting none of it back!

Thieves. Also, the thinking behind this ruling would seem to also qualify personal computers and phones or indeed any device that plays audio as being subject to this levy. comment at the globe and mail

Hello, this is where the bytes meet the atoms and one wins.

I have a three hundred gig disk in my beaten up old computer. And a one gig thumb drive ($12.99, the Source and you get a free golf game) for quick copying of tunes - and a thousand other things.

The game is over for people who think that the physical world and intellectual property have any intersection any more. And, well, yes, you could impose a levy on my hard drive and my thumb drive and Ipods. But, er, what about cell phones or digital cameras or the 2GB stick of flash memory which holds my cheap camera’s shots or could hold a couple of movies?

Copyright law and that which flows from it presumed a complicated process of reproduction; bytes chage everything as Negroponte pointed out a decade ago. The quicker people who make music, movies, software, games and all else digital accept this the faster they can turn their minds to how to make a living when copying is the norm rather than the exception.

Written by jay on July 24th, 2007 with 1 comment.
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Profiles in Courage

Evon Reid, who is one credit short of a political science degree from the University of Toronto, applied for a position as a media analyst with the Ontario government and last week e-mailed the cabinet office to follow up. Aileen Siu, an office worker, replied: “This is the ghetto dude that I spoke to before.”

Ms. Siu intended to forward the message to co-workers, but mistakenly sent the response to Mr. Reid, who is black.

Sunday, Mr. McGuinty phoned Mr. Reid and “apologized for the completely unacceptable incident … and he thanked Evon for having the courage to go public,” said Chris Morley, a spokesman for Mr. McGuinty. globe and mail

LOL

Written by jay on July 24th, 2007 with no comments.
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