Month: April 2004

Here's my story from today's Globe and Mail:

While at the University of Waterloo, Matt Goyer and his housemates didn't want to buy premium television channels such as The Movie Network.

But to make sure they didn't miss an episode of The Sopranos or Six Feet Under, both of which air in Canada on The Movie Network, Mr. Goyer and his friends would fire up a new kind of Internet-based file trading software application called BitTorrent and download episodes that had been digitized by other fans.

“You can get a ton of content. You name any TV show,” Mr. Goyer said yesterday from his office in Redmond, Wash., where he has started with Microsoft Corp. after finishing his studies at Waterloo this year.

Mr. Goyer and his friends scare companies that own the rights to television programs, films, software and books — content that can be digitized and distributed on the Internet with ease using freely available software.
In the wake of a Federal Court of Canada ruling yesterday involving the country's biggest record companies, some rights holders are worried that they have lost the ability to protect those rights.

“It would be unfortunate if people saw this decision and suddenly decided to use file-sharing to distribute copyrighted works. That's just not the case,” said Jacqueline Hushion, executive director of the Canadian Publishers Council … [Read the full story]

The Globe also publishes today a lengthy editorial on the issue of copyright form:

[The judge] ruled that posting thousands of songs on one's hard drive with the door open to downloaders worldwide does not amount to “authorizing” others to use them, any more than placing aphotocopier in a library does.

It's a bad analogy. Better to think of the uploader as a person who makes 300 photocopies of a book in the library and leaves them outside the door for anyone to pick up and take away. To our mind, the very posting of the files, accessible to all, clearly indicates an element of intent and encouragement. We hope a higher court will say so if the CRIA appeals the ruling . . . [Read the full editorial]

And finally, my colleague George Emerson jumps into the debate with an op-ed piece on the issue:

I hope our Federal Court judge's name [Konrad von Finckenstein] becomes a byword and a new rallying cry for our rights as citizens, consumers and taxpayers in the digital millennium. Maybe we'll have to shout, “Von, man, you rock!” every time we start to get back some of our privacy and property rights that are steadily being eroded by corporate greed and dumb legislation.

Mr. Justice von Finckenstein has, for the time being, slapped down the international entertainment industry's attempt to get what are, in effect, private corporate wiretaps on people who may or may not be sharing music files over the Internet. They already have them in the United States, thanks to current interpretations of a wrongheaded bill called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which Congress passed in 1998. [Read all of George's piece]

My Globe and Mail colleague Ian Brown has an interesting story today about the ethical challenges faced by broadcasters and newspaper editors earlier this week over coverage of the murder and desecration of four Americans in Iraq. Many networks refused to show the footage of cheering crowds burning and mutilating the bodies. Some networks waited until after prime-time. Newspaper front pages the next day took a variety of approaches. Here's an excerpt from Brown's story:
“Concerns … gripped a late-afternoon meeting of Globe and Mail editors. Where normally three editors decide what picture will grace the front of the next day's Globe, this time 11 were involved, four of whom were women. Only one, deputy national editor Catherine Wallace, was in favour of using the most graphic of the pictures, a headless, armless, legless, charcoaled torso. “It was because I think that sometimes things are so barbarous that you should show how barbarous they are,” Ms. Wallace explained.
But The Globe's editors decided against the picture, based on three considerations: “the Cheerios factor” (not wanting to sicken breakfast readers), how much blood was shown (especially important in a colour picture), and how best to tell the story. “We were trying to find a balance between covering the story and not wanting to assault our readers,” editor Edward Greenspon added. “Your concern in these things is always, 'How do I best serve my readers?'””
If you can get a copy of the paper today, Brown's article is on A12 with thumbnail-sized colour reproductions of several of the front pages he refers to in his article.

I never thought I'd be quoting Pravda back to anyone, but here I am, with a pointer to a Pravda article on the 10 best April Fool's Jokes perpetrated by the media.. I liked the one where an Irish newspaper wrote that Disney was looking to buy Lenin so it do its own version of Lenin's tomb in Disneyland!

The Canadian Recording Industry Association plans to appeal a Federal Court of Canada ruling yesterday that not only denied CRIA's request to force ISPs to turn over some customer records of alleged file-swappers but also said downloading and uploading in Canada do not infringe copyright. The link to my report on last night's CTV National News report on this is here. You can also check out my colleague Keith Damsell's report in this morning's Globe and Mail.

In addition to the appeal, look for the record industry in Canada to engage in some serious lobbying and public relations work with the goal of convincing Ottawa lawmakers to change copyright laws to be, perhaps, more like those in the U.S., where record companies have had great success suing what it calls music pirates.

CRIA's issued a short statement yesterday, vowing to continue to fight against free download.
I interviewed lots of people about this yesterday (some of which is in the CTV news item), but I will try to add more comments from those I talked to later today.
I'll also try to post links from the blogosphere as I come across reaction to his story;

• Here's Tim Bray: “I would just totally love if it I could post the occasional excellent piece of music here, and I bet it would drive business to the artists and their published works; and I?d love it if some of the other people whom I?ve gotten close to via their writing were able to share some of their faves with me, too.”
• Here's Mark Evans: “To be perfectly blunt, the music industry was badly spanked yesterday….”
• The inevitable Slashdot free-for-all
• Michael O'Connor Clarke: “…Another example of the Canadian judiciary demonstrating less willingness to roll over at the request of the big entertainment industry concerns…”
• Here's Wendy Seltzer: “…Congrats to the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, whose intervention helped the court get there..”
• Here's Ernest Miller: “…Now, the CRIA obviously did a terrible job putting together their case. But if the court basically ruled that they can't put together any case for a large number of filesharers, copyright is in serious trouble. ”
• Here's David Weinberger: “… a Canadian judge has made, in a nutshell, all the right decisions about file sharing and copyright…”

At CTV, we move video across the country and around the world on high-capacity fibre links — a kind of souped-up Internet. This system is relatively new — less than two years old. We call it the Gateway.

It lets me, for example, look at video on my desktop from CNN, APTN, or affiliates anywhere in the CTV system. It's how we move video between bureaus. I think it's a remarkable innovation.

 In my print capacity, I'm used to seeing wires full of great content which helps me do my job. Gateway does something similar for us video journalists. I can see raw news clips and images which helps me tell better stories.

And all of this has largely been developed in-house at CTV. I bring all this up because today the Globe and Mail describes this system and its development:

CTV's Gateway opens door to a TV news revolution
The broadband evolution has sparked a broadcast revolution.
TV newsrooms across Canada are shunning traditional satellite and fibre-line feeds in favour of Internet protocol (IP) technology to move their video . . .

 

Forrester Research makes what is surely a controversial conclusion: Microsoft's Windows platform is a more secure computing platform than various Linux computing platforms. Forrester's counts the number of flaws in each platform over a given period of time and then analyzes how long it took for that flaw to be corrected. I've not got a link to the Forrester study but Computer Business Review reports that Forrester says Windows had fewer flaws than the Red Hat, Mandrake, or Debian distribution of Linux and Microsoft posted patches more quickly than the communities that develop those Linux distribution.

Interesting points which, if nothing else, may spur the development communities behind those Linux distributions to look at ways to speed up reaction time to security problems. On the other hand, I'm not so sure that you can make the blanket statement that one platform is more secure than the others without doing a qualitative analysis of the kind of flaws typical on each platform. Is one Windows flaw equal to one Red Hat flaw?