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.

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?

OK. this is the first film review I’ve posted here. Silly me; with my interests, why shouldn’t I review films? Oh, and if you care, a caution in advance. Here be spoilers. If you haven’t watched the film, and want to experience it for yourself first, you’ve been warned.

From the first scene you knew you were in for a turn-it-to-11 Shock & Roll experience. There was no hope in hell that the first five minutes of this film were going to be anything but: set-up, oh, OH, to bad, to worse, to even very badder, and then badder still, until the ultimate disgust and revulsion could possibly be intimated on the screen—these people who can do this are not just monsters, way worse than animals— they are demons. Um, I’m speaking about the characters here, right?

I thought initially that the brushes used for this high-concept venture  were perhaps a little broad—did the people who green-lit this thing actually READ the script, or just have assistants (all of them under 25; never ask someone that young for advice about movies or dessert. You’ll end up with an insulin reaction and a sour taste in your mouth. And maybe cavities.) pitch them a synopsis? But then, the creators did match the treatment with the colour palette—green, grey, clays, blues, graininess, more texture than should have been necessary, especially on BlueRay—and the sound design. Thumping, heavy. For those credits junkies out there: did you catch how big the Foley team was? And that score… telegraph much? I missed the sound of the scene changes from the original Batman show.

Production design; I know you wanted to do a comic book movie, but shouldn’t someone have done some research? Just a little? And you, Mr. Scriptwriter dude—c’mon; Marcus Aurelius? Ever hear of a Triumph? Didn’t you WATCH HBO’s Rome? I did like the cinematography, but Geez. What’s a DP to do when they only want certain kinds of a look? And never, ever trust a Director with anagramatous names.

So we, oh so horrifically, establish the grievous act that provides the momentum for the plot. Cut to justice rolls a few months later, and we can see the needs for a balance & alignment due to seriously overdone boy-racer tendencies of those Marios and Michaels who lead the red stallion of Team Justice through the Steeplechase of the legal labyrinth to the goal of balance, restitution, and closure for people, society, and the survivors. OK, THAT was purple prose. Maybe Ultraviolet? <G>

If a man has a plan to make it all better later, what’s to say that the decisions he makes to get to the position of executing his grand plan won’t be the grit that prevents the execution of the final vision? And a perp that makes a deal gets to shake hands with the DA in front of cameras? I thought they already established that Jamie’s character was a real operator?

So, then we move on ten years. TEN YEARS? Like that? Wap in the face with the parallel dialogue with the kid; yep that facial fuzz on our hero really speaks about moving on and up.

Batman imagery: shadows, Gerard working on a Leonardo Da Vinci style flying machine, then slipping his clothes off for the expected appearance of the arresting officers, to strike yet another Da Vinci pose as the symbol for man. We hear from the oh so useful 5^th business explaining to our hero why and how the anti-hero, the dark avenger, this unholy spawn of Bruce Wayne and The Punisher, does what he does, and that there’s really no stopping him. Supervillain/arch-vigilante? We can see the genetics mesh in the later gadgetry, Batcave allusions, smouldering near insanity, etc.

Jamie Foxx’s protégé; 10 years later and she’s still this unsure of herself? Man, in a city like Philly we are supposed to believe that this woman, lawyer, assistant prosecutor, hasn’t grown at all in a decade, and she’s still on the job? I call BS. She would have been eaten alive long before the segue was over. And what about her slapping Jamie with the Ovaries card? “I’m not going to have choice forever, and I want to know that I gave “it” up for something I can believe in.” OMG!

You may recall the totally unnecessary scene before the police confrontation, where our aggrieved proto-nemesis is fiddling with something that looks remarkably like a Da Vinci flying model, while, incidentally, the play of light across Butler’s body, and the curved framework behind him, invoked the very obvious ghost of Batman? The Dark Avenger? Well, the next obvious Da Vinci symbol for me has got to be the naked man drawing, spread-eagled inside a circle. That’s what I would bet the design was, and what was represented on the story boards. You know. Batman—Bruce Wayne—Renaissance Man—Leonardo— Get where I’m going with this? Do you think that was discussed at production & design meetings? Of course it was.

Colm Meaney, what were you doing in this film? Was the mortgage due? When you and Gerard are glaring at each other in the interrogation room, was your motivation “You Scottish bastard!” Was Gerard’s “You Irish Prick!” “Your accent’s shite!” “No, yours is shiter!”

How the bloody hell did our dramatically-dead, mooning ovaries assistant have a contact so useful as to get copies of Bruce’s… I mean Dudley’s… I mean Clyde’s… expenses!!! And then we’re going to match those expenses (Look! The Numbers Match!) to the properties Clyde’s holding company registered in Panama has acquired around the Philly area (and I thought the rest of the country, I can’t remember). Oh, and did this move the story forward, or did it just reveal how clever our anti-hero is? I forget again. Or maybe they didn’t explain that part. It’s pretty tough getting the fine lines in when your painting your movie with a 4″ edging brush.

Did you get a load of those syringes in the execution scene? You wouldn’t have had to put anything but coloured water in them to kill someone; there must have been an extra 3 litres of fluid in the guy’s blood vessels. That alone could have killed him. Nice vein effects, though. But of course, we needed the agony, the long, shocking painful screaming & writhing (pissing and shitting himself too, but perhaps over the top for our director, or maybe he just didn’t think about it?).

Jamie gets to hit somebody; wow, that’s the law for you. And the gun at the end? And the outstmarting, by Jamie & Colm? And the Judge getting killed by her own cell phone? After giving a 2-sentence synopsis of the Bush Administration’s respect for the rule of law and Jurisprudence?

Oh, I’m betting this film made money. And that makes me sad.

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?

This morning a colleague on the Graphic Designers of Canada mail list posted an article from the Tyee on Social Media, which prompted me to write the following mini-essay. My headline? Just because you tried FaceBook for a week does not make you an expert in Social Media, or qualified to judge the usefulness of the class of applications, or any one instance of a social media application.

I think Shannon is not really giving the technology-mediated social evolution enough attention, or a fair try.

I didn’t give FaceBook much of a go before surrendering to the(what seemed to me) continuous barrage of Vampire vs. Zombie vs. Werewolf Shannon writes about. That may have more to do with having a 13-year old daughter as a “friend” than the inherent silliness of the apps FaceBook allows. Poking, nudging, or otherwise trying to grab my attention with things I will not be interested in IS a major distraction, and due to the UI of FaceBook, and I daresay it’s overall architecture and the vision for commercializing it, makes it a non-starter for anyone NOT interested in a site that supports play, rather than communication. Which is not to say that communication DOESN’T happen while playing, but it’s not my cup of tea, or, I’m guessing, Ms. Rupp’s.

Twitter, on the other hand, seems to allow users to tailor their “Twitterience” for how they want to interact. Yes, there are celeb-followers. Yes, there are spambots, and “get rich quick” systems morons, who probably believe—for a day or two, anyway—that Twitter will make them rich. How, I’ve never gleaned from looking at the market-spiel sites, but other than as a study in human gullibility, I don’t care.

Twitter, for what it’s worth, is simple. You can embed a URL for more info. You can follow people you like, or work with, or are curious about. You can unfollow people when you find their tweets are not interesting to you. You can block people (or bots) that follow you. In the few weeks since I have been on Twitter, I have found:

1. I have access to information, whether just personal curiosity or objectively important to me, I would not have for days (or longer) otherwise. This is important to ME.
2. It does not eat up nearly as much time as anything else I’ve tried.
3. It seems to produce real dialogue between members, which (unlike real time IM clients like Skype) does not require me to learn new, awkward ways to end a dialogue or get out of a conversation.
4. Has a really simple interface, few bells and whistles, but allows the user to customize to a point of uniqueness, yet preserves the key components’ use and location.

The folks who created Twitter have done something right, at least from my perspective. Like predictive text entry on cell phones, it does require you do relax, try it out for a while, then decide if it works for you or not. But I think it’s a game changer.

Your comments are welcome.

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!