Here’s the response to my letter I got  from my MP, John Weston.

Please, someone, is there any answers here, or is this just an automated response using some of the words, but no verbs.

Dear Mr. Campbell;

Thank you for your letter regarding the proposed updates to the Canadian Copyright Legislation. I appreciate your presence in the community and your strong personal interest in improving Copyright legislation.

It is clear that Canadians are concerned with copyright and its implications in our increasingly digital environment. Extensive copyright consultations that took place across Canada this past summer received great public interest and participation, and I am following closely the proposed improvements to our legislation.

This government said that it would modernize Canada’s copyright laws and that is what we intend to do. That is why our government is taking this opportunity to listen to Canadians about what is important to them on copyright, and demonstrating leadership within the current copyright debate.

We recognize that new technologies are changing the landscape of Canada’s copyright law. Canada must adapt these laws to be more modern and flexible and our government is working to meet this challenge. Updated copyright legislation can only strengthen Canada’s ability to compete in the global digital economy.

I hope that this answers some of you questions regarding improvements to Copyright legislation.

Thank you again for writing.

Sincerely,

John Weston, MP
West Vancouver – Sunshine Coast – Sea-to-Sky Country

Here’s a letter a wrote to the Honourable John Weston, my Member of Parliament, voicing my concern over Bill C-32, the Canadian Copyright Reform Bill.

Dear Mr. Weston,

I am writing to you today to voice my concerns at what I see as a seriously misguided attempt to evolve fair and equitable law around the creation & dissemination of original works by artists, creators & authors.

Digital versus physical: property vs. ideas—I may lend someone my physical property, or I may sell or gift others my physical property. If I lend someone a book, once they have read and returned that book, the real value—the ideas represented by words & letters printed on paper and assembled into a book—is still mine, as well as imprinted into the mind of the person who I lent the book to. I still have the important aspect that is represented by the book, as well as the physical artifact, and most importantly, so does the person I lent the book to. In their mind. If the ideas represented by the creation of that book are important enough to the person who borrowed the book from me, that person will in all likelihood seek out more information by the book’s creator. As Tim O’Reilly, founder & publisher of O’Reilly Books has said: “More authors are victims of obscurity than piracy”. Mind share is very hard to build. This bill will not help anyone new to the marketplace do so.

Evolution & progress usually go in 1 direction. To attempt to enshrine into law rules that stop this from happening fossilizes business, creates monopoly, and builds frustration amongst consumers. When obviously better means of delivering customer value are available, and ignored, how can any political party that espouses an ideology of market-driven economics think that it is following that ideology by stopping the evolution of new business models? If the organizations that are so happy to meet with the sponsors of Bill C-32 are afraid or too lazy to innovate, then by current market-force economic theory, they should be forced out of the market by newer, more efficient providers of the same products & services. Market forces are not in effect when legislation is required to protect an industry’s value chains.

Most business-minded people work very hard to disintermediate unnecessary, wasteful steps in their business’s value chains. This is called maximizing efficiency, and delivering shareholder value. With the technology advances over the last several decades, and the familiarity and experience more and more people have with them, large distribution and sales networks are being made redundant. Is it honestly called “market forces at work” to fossilize the content consolidation businesses built in the middle of the 20th century, so that they can continue to monopolize in perpetuity what is no longer required in order to deliver to the market what customers want?

Government focus has been on discussing this with entrenched business models that want to keep things the way they were a half-century century ago. History, social science, technology & economic, does not work that way. Governments that implement legislation to fulfill the short-term goals of powerful lobby groups do not stay in power for long. The genie of a global network delivering the combined knowledge of all of mankind TO all of connected mankind cannot be put back in the bottle, on command of the declining content delivery industry. Governments were also lobbied by the stagecoach and livery industries to stop the spread of the automotive innovators in the early 20th century.

As the French learned in 1940, a fixed line of defence pointed in one direction simply means your opponents will manoeuvre around those defences, and defeat you that way.

Legislation, and the organizations that draft it, that does not explore and understand the landscape in which this legislation is intended to operate, make the situation worse, not better. This is akin to the Catholic church stopping Galileo from writing about his observations of the solar system, because it didn’t suit the Church’s ideology.

I urge you to voice questions to the House regarding these concerns. I am not alone in raising them, and I do not want to see my country create criminals out of its citizens to support the antiquated business models of industries that need to evolve, or go the way of the buggy whip manufacturers. That is not the way Canada does things.

Respectfully yours,

Bruce M. Campbell

Ever see one of those corporate-sponsored “fact” articles about how our manufacturers have gone “green” by reducing the material used in the production of the cans, bottles, tetrapaks, cartons, etc. that we all consume and dispose of every day? I recall an info-graphic showing a comparison of the construction and wall-thicknesses of soda cans over the years. The techniques used to produce the cans could easily be seen to be a better use of raw materials, more streamlined, etc., the weight had come down, the number of parts for each container has been reduced, the “Laverne & Shirley” style assembly line was made redundant, and cans, bottles et al themselves are lighter, stored better, have a full recycling life behind and in front of them, and have been seen by most people as a model of what could be done by marrying modern industry with a full undersdtanding of Earth Stewardship.

New! Improved! [Profit Margin!]

We’re paying the companies to make those improvements, with every instance of their product we buy. And when we recycle the container that we have used, we are effectively being paid way less than minimum wage to procure the raw material used to make the cans, back to the companies that will sell the product back to us, time after time after time.

Then we need to look at what we are actually purchasing in these containers. Such clever designs these days. all the ribbing, which adds to the strength and rigidity of thinner, more ergonomic containers. Drip-free caps. Splash-proof containers.

Waste? What’s that?

How much of the contents of your purchased consumable can you actually get out of the container? Do you dispose/recycle your containers with 1% of the contents sticking to the insides? Half a percent? That’s nothing, right? To you, and me, it’s nothing. We’re going to eat it, drink it, wash with it, spray it, etc. Even spill it. But for every drop you can’t use because the design of the container ensures you can’t empty it, that’s probably an additional 2 or 3 extra purchases per person per year. How many tubes of toothpaste does your family go through in a year? In a 100 ml tube, I’ll bet that the average person throws away 5%, because it’s impossible to get it out of the tube. Multiply by years, and total customer base, and you’ve got additional sales based on the idea of actual consumption being somewhat less than the promise of consumption, by my estimate of an additional half to 2 percent. Doesn’t sound like much, but that’s the typical sales commission for a Financial Planner, or a sales guy at your local massive furniture warehouse. I really would find it hard to believe that the priority for packaging design has “ensure contents can be consumed completely” is in the top 5 on the brief. Or even in the top 20.

This has got me a bit peeved. I strongly believe that humanity has got to take better care of the resources we have on this one, small planet. My kids wear a lot of recycled clothes. We ALL don’t need a car, a lawn mower, bicycles, etc. Most of us use these things a very small fraction of the time, yet we all seem to “need” them, because sharing is just too inconvenient. So why are we all paying the corporations that sell us this stuff for the privilege of reducing their value-chains through our training to help them with their waste?

Service Charges Galore

It’s not just physical goods either. Notice the service charges on your bank statements? Those weren’t there 15 years ago. Banks have reduced physical presence, invested in cheaper, faster and more distributed information infrastructures. Their costs have gone way, way down since the invention and mass-rollout of ATMs and on-line banking. Yet we are all paying more than we used to for the privilege of using these services as a “convenience fee”. Effectively, you’re paying extra to reduce the overheads for the banks. Does this seem reasonable?

The corporations claim that the costs per customer are tiny, and that someone has to pay for supporting all the services we all have access to. Does this mean that we have more services available to us than in our parents’ time? I don’t think so… My parents seemed to have more free time back then than I do now. Then again, CEOs only earned 50 times what the average employee did back then, instead of the 500 times of today. All that money’s gotta come from somewhere…

Update

I’ve had a few people thank me for the list, and while it may be some time before I get any robust feedback, hopefully people will find something useful, mind-altering, or entertaining out if these recommendations.
A friend of mine recently asked me for some suggestions of good stuff to read, as she’s on a bulk-it-up read-avore diet. Here’s my list of the past year or three’s “Must-reads”—

Non-Fiction

Misha Glenny, “McMafia”
If Capitalism won the Cold War, why is the world worse off now than it was then? A very, very scary read… but then I WANT to know what’s hiding under the bed!

Douglas Rushkoff, “Life Inc.”
Does more to clarify WHY the world is the way it is now than any other book I’ve read. Ever.

Noami Klein, “No Logo”
Journalistic work about the ascendency of branding in our world, and the marketing/propaganda efforts that made it so.

Naomi Klein, “Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”
Exposes the cabal of Chicago School economics and multinationals & imperial ambitions of certain nations, and the effect this is having on the world.

Naomi Wolf, “The Beauty Myth”
Brilliant dissection & analysis of the economic creation of beauty and how gender roles & stereotypes have been pegged to a market valuation, just like gold or oil.

Naomi Wolf, “The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot”
A polemic on the end of the republic and the creation of an empire. Says more emotively what Noam Chomsky has put forth in some of his works on the subject. While published in the height of the Bush/Cheney years, when totalitarianism seemed a more overt danger in the US, all the forces that created that risk are still in place, and could become ascendant again. The parallels to the death of the Roman republic seem terrifyingly strong to me. There is (or was—you never know when stuff gets pulled—very Orwellian!) a YouTube video of Wolf lecturing to a University audience on this topic. A must see!

Sam Harris, “Letter to a Christian Nation”
Epistle to wake up, grow up, and put aside childish things, stop believing in the “Sky Bully” and stop using “Faith” as a control of others with less power. Not as dry or ego-filled as Dawkin’s “God Delusion”, it’s tightly structured, and soundly written.

Rhonda Britten, “Fearless Loving”
Seemingly out of place on this list, I found this book helped me understand myself, and how I fit into the world, why I thought about things and emotional attachments to things, and how to stop worrying—or at least begin to stop—about what people thought about me, or whether they would like me.

Three Novels:

Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter, “The Light of Other Days”
A brilliant romp through what happens to society when the rules of time, matter, and therefore people change from those we all assume work.

Andrew Davidson, “The Gargoyle”
This thing is a gothic romance. The best damn gothic romance I could never contemplate picking up, much less flash though, enjoying every word, and being completely transported. Magical work. Literally.

Will Ferguson, “Happiness™”
Another “Magical Reality” tale, about the search for that ultimate, final, universally effective self-help book… what if someone actually wrote it? How would the world we know, designed to make each of us as miserable as possible to generate a maximum as possible profit, look like if we could no longer be positioned or restrained by our fears & neuroses?

Video

But of course books aren’t the only way to ingest information. A few videos online that I found both moving and enjoyable:

Joss Whedon, accepting the award from the Harvard Humanist Society:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTY8-XPhTzQ&feature=player_embedded

Joss Whedon, delivering a keynote speech at the Equality Now Conference:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYaczoJMRhs

George CarIin’s two most memorable routines:
George Carlin – Religion is bullshit.

George Carlin – Saving the Planet

And, this video of the noted author & co-father of the cyber-punk sub-subgenre, Bruce Sterling, delivering the keynote to Reboot-11.

Other

For a continuous feed of things happening in our world, filtered & focused by intelligences not yet in the power of the Status-quo media channels, and unbeknownst to them, these upstarts are cybernetically enhanced! BoingBoing.Net

If you are aurally inclined, tune into the Blog/Podcast DyscultereD where hosts Anthony Marc, Andrew Currie & Mike Vardy tell it like it is (or at least, how they think it is) about technology, politics, culture, entertainment, gaming, etc. with a uniquely Canadian spin.

And, for more another eye-opening experience, Cory Doctorow is Canada’s own superhero: a mild-mannered Science Fiction author by day, evil corporate giant prosecutor by night. Cory has written Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom, a short story collection calledA Place So Foreign and Eight More, Eastern Standard Tribe, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, a collection of essays called Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, and the current run of books Little Brother, a NY Times best seller, Makers, & just released, For the Win. So why aren’t those books all up in the Novels section?
Because Doctorow’s really hard to categorize (like, *blush* me)—he’s an activist (ex-Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), an entrepreneur, a journalist, and an extremely outspoken & passionate advocate for sane, intelligent legislation regarding creative works, intellectual property, and copyright. You can find free downloadable copies of his stuff at his site, Craphound.com.

Kottke recently published a chart showing the relative stock performance of Apple and Microsoft over the last 25 years. The first impression is startling. Anyone remember when Apple stock was under $12? I do. Remember when Jobs got kicked out, and a year later, a lot of MS fanboys starting taunting Apple-fans for their misguided loyalty?

Long term thinking is not something our society, and more importantly, our economy, has much patience for. Or any patience, come to think of it. That word seem to have disappeared from the popular culture. When was the last time you heard a politician urge his/her audience to “be patient”? Doesn’t work, right?

Looking back at the graph, we see the little line of Google moving up, some 20 years after the initial splash of AAPL & MSFT. Still low on the chart, we see Google paralleling the rather flat performance of Microsoft. Considering how Apple did in it’s first 20 years, I wonder what this graph will look like in another 10?

Someone tweeted yesterday (I think it was Clay Shirkey, retweeting Kottke) that if he’d bought Apple stock instead of his old G3 iBook, the shares would be worth $140,000. Of course, maybe the work he did and got paid for on that G3 is worth way more than that. But the statement does raise an eyebrow.

Apple’s Jobs & Wozniak created their company becuase they wanted to change the world. Gates & Allen created Microsoft to make a lot of money, and ultimately, aspired to rule the [commercial, corporate computing] world. There’s a huge world-view of difference in those two primary motivators. People who want to change the world have a slightly larger perspective from those who merely want to rule it. You need a far, far bigger brain to imagine the effects of the former. Who knows what things will look like when Google, Twitter, et al. are approaching their 30th birthdays?

How long do you expect your technology purchases to last? My venerable workhorse laptop, a 1st Generation MacBook Pro, has been, I recently learned, crashing due to overheating. Neither of its cooling fans are working. I should have been able to detect this months earlier, but I had neglected to reinstall a system monitoring utility the last time I rebuilt my hard drive, and so didn’t have the obvious indicators in front of me. Bjango makes a great little widget application called iStat Pro, which can be configured to give you as much or as little information as you are ever likely to need to monitor the health of your Mac.

So Apple, I have generally been pretty happy with your offerings over the last 25 years (THAT long?), and certainly this MBP has been a workhorse for me, pretty much key to any living I’ve made in the last 4 years. With this current issue, I have just realized that there has been a problem with heat dissipation for quite some time now, and simply didn’t think there was any issue until the frequency of crashing entered the realm of many times a day.

The opinion now coalescing in my stressed out brain (I can’t live without my computer! Really, it’s my livelihood) is that this situation has been developing for some time. I now recollect, in the distant past, the fans racing like Formula 1 Ferraris under the heavy foot of a Schumacher. It wasn’t until I browsed through the Apple Support Discussion Forums, armed with the error code revealed by the Hardware Diagnostics app that came with the MBP (where the hell did I put those discs? Oh, up there.) did I realize that something was very, very wrong. People on the ASDFs reported logic board replacements, heat sensor replacements, AppleCare being invoked many, many times, leverage being applied to to senior AppleStore managers to get a decent resolution, etc.

“So what?” you may say. “Stuff breaks down all the time. That’s what the world is like.” OK, I’ll agree with you on a lot of things. Cars need tuneups & oil changes, wheels aligned and tires replaced. But shouldn’t a laptop be designed (and have that design tested) to ensure that a key part of it’s continuing function, cooling, continues to function to the usable life of the computer? Eh. That raises the question of “What is the usable life on a MacBook Pro?”

Longer than I’ve owned this one for. Other than the fans, and a new, bigger hard drive which I replaced myself, it’s been a great machine. If I also want to replace the fans myself, I can’t get source the parts in Canada, so I’ve either got to send the MBP in to get fixed—way out of either warrantee or AppleCare—or mail-order to the USA for the correct parts (with all the grossly inflated shipping, time, etc., incurred), then spend 1–2 hours tearing my machine apart. Oh joy. I’d better make sure I get the correct part numbers…

Ah well.

Update

I finally got the fans (Thanks to MacStation Yaletown—$37 each!), put aside some time, arranged my tools and repurposed a foam egg carton as a parts repository, then reviewed the procedure on iFixit.com’s amazing site—if you have any kind of aptitude with tools, are reasonable organized, and have more time than money, give it a try—and suddenly I’ve got a machine that can cool itself again!

I expect that some would like to see this topic die, but I just saw a very effective communication and decision-making excercise, complete with real data behind it, happen in less than 4 hours.

Neil Gaiman is a long-time Twitter user (Really! he doesn’t have an admin assistant filling in for him) who often posts more than 15 messages a day. He isn’t trying to sell anything; his tweets aren’t carefully crafted, focused 140-character mini-campaigns to get followers to buy his books or go see the movies or plays so he will receive yet more royalties.

He basically (or so it looks to me) just shares things about his life to anyone who cares to know. Kind of like what you do when you’re kicking back with a beer and some friends on a Saturday afternoon get-together.

OK, he’s a VERY successful writer, who has more than a half-million followers, and he can put a sentence together. But I would estimate that less than 20% of his posts relate to promoting his works. The rest are about people he knows, things he likes to do, people he wants others to know about, and just kind of random stuff. I do exactly that (except I don’t have a speaking schedule that I want to remind you of), as do most of you. Usually via e-mail.

Why Gaiman’s example from today as a case for the benefits of Social Media’s importance, is that he seems to care an awful lot about certain causes, like free and open education, and logical and reasonable copyright, and is an enthusiastic proponent for people using the technologies available to the limit of their ingenuity (assuming that no-one really suffers as a result).

This morning, Gaiman posted a request to any teachers following him, or for followers to ask any teachers they knew, whether they would prefer to get a DVD of his recent The Grave Book, or just get to the multimedia via a website (search Twitter for #TGBDVD). The end of the story is that he got a very solid response back from his followers, which enabled him to go to his publisher (Harper Children) and tell them that 97% of teachers who responded wanted a DVD to be available.

A quick perusal of the tagged messages revealed loads of information that wouldn’t be obvious, like “websites can go away, and so would the media available from them” “I would BUY the DVD” and “My school’s firewall wouldn’t let the content through.”

I wonder if such insights were discussed at the production and distribution meetings at the publishers? My guess, from experience working at publishers, as well as other content “producers”, is that they would have been worried about the costs of copying DVDs and the additional distribution hassle. The numbers (as they see them) come first, the customers after. And, what the customers actually want usually comes as a complete surprise to the “content providers”.

So, with Mr. Gaiman’s presentation of a significant percentage of the marketplace, in less than 1/2 a day Harper Childrens has flipped from distributing the multimedia version of this book on web only to also distributing DVDs, possibly even for additional revenue (and profit. It’s WAY cheaper to burn a DVD that it is to print & bind a book).

The target market community was polled at a very high sample rate about their preferred means of acquiring product. The product creator did it himself, with virtually no overhead. Is it so difficult for the “content providers” to wrap their heads around the possibilities available? This affects everything about product and service. And it shouldn’t take long before the early adopter curve tops out and everyone gets on the train. Be prepared. We will all be affected.