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

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.

Multitasking is a total nonsense, we’re told. People who think they can do several things at once do none of them well, and the good old empirical evidence gets piled up by folks doing a bad Wolf Blitzer impression to slaughter any dissent on the matter. Yet my 14-year old daughter, who has a prolific portfolio of art and animation, several IM friends who she is in regular contact with, and a prolific knowledge of several areas of particular interest to her, plus a reasonably good Grade 9’s knowledge of the theory and precedents that influenced her special interest sources.

I clearly remember my first university psychology course, held in one of those giant tiered lecture theatres. The professor (way up there in the heirarchy of that most bat-like of the academic genres—is it a science, or is it a humanities field?) told all three hundred or so of us that “If we listened to the radio or watched TV while we studied, we could not be efficient” students, people simply couldn’t do two or more things as well as focusing on one thing. This was his opening sentence to this freshman class, positing that the habits (I presume) we would apply to learning would not be optimal. The ghost of Henny Youngman would have asked “as efficient as what?” which means that ghost is hovering over the dividing line between scientists/engineers and artists/crafters.

I’ll go with the notion that when something REALLY needs to get done in a short amount of time, the best approach is to narrowly focus on that task, excluding all other distractions. Top-down planners try to do this by managing the environment where the task is performed. Really strong willed people (ninjas, yogis and other extremely disciplined minds) can simply block out all the extraneous clutter trying to muscle in on the required senses.

Most of us will fall somewhere in between these two poles; stark, hateful prisons end up building a feedback loop of loathing, making the task harder, and the intense focus possible with sufficient force of will is really a byproduct (or side-effect) of brain-washing. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing; how else do we get really good at anything?

What people who focus on the headlines only tend to miss is that EVERYONE is somewhere on the ADD—ASD (autism spectrum disorder) scale, and where we are changes as we change. Daily, hourly, whatever the rythym of our existence demands, will slide that controller on our respective widecast/narrowcast focus to suit the task or activity at hand. Sure, they’re time-slicing, but isn’t that what always happens? Isn’t what’s really going on just the definition of what constitutes an efficient “unit” of work?

So, when the “experts say” people are not able to manage multiple tasks, they’re correct to a point. When it really matters, and when the individual in question feels that it is important to do so, they will. The old models of time management still have relevance, but the laws of “time management physics” have altered slightly in this new dimension, so we’re still waiting for the new Galileos and Newtons to figure out the revised rules. Maybe that guy in front of you who is IMing, playing a game, ’shopping a new piccy for his DA friends and writing the latest entry for his blog is doing that research. Sure is annoying, isn’t it?

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.

I’ve been converted. Many, many people have been using blogs for yonks, and while I profess to writing as a unique strength, I’m not exactly getting the evidence out there to demonstrate my prowess (if you would permit me the liberty). WordPress seems like the best choice, as their appear to be more options and flexibility with site design, architecture, etc. Anyway, here it is, and here I am. Yet another hopeful voice in the digital wilderness, trying to say something that may amuse, inform, help or correct. I’m ready to take my lumps now. Even if those lumps are the windy, cold wash of being stuck in a lonely corner, being ignored.

Time shall tell!