David Akin’s On The Hill

Leah Theriault, an S.J.D. candidate at the University of Toronto, writing in the inaugural issue of Innovate magazine (the in-house mag at the U of T's Centre for Innovation Law and Policy):

The Canadian Government’s slow pace in implementing the WIPO treaties could actually work to its advantage, allowing it to learn from the mistakes of other jurisdictions, particularly the U.S. Instead, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage has stated that it wants the government to have draft legislation ready by February 2004. We can only hope that the government has the good sense to realize what the copyright industries have not: if you treat your customers badly enough, they will eventually turn against you. And that is not in the copyright owners’ long-term interest.

Reviewing several books on the state of the American body politic, Andrew Hacker says that only 40 per cent of Canadians who emigrate to the U.S. seek to take out American citizenship. Just 33 per cent of Mexicans who end up living and working in American ask for the rights and responsibilities that come with citizenship.
Koreans and Filipinos who emigrate to the U.S. are keen to become citizens, with 71 per cent and 76 per cent respectively, becoming citizens of the republic.
I'm not sure what that means but I'll bet if I had some more data I could start figuring it out.
How many Americans who emigrate to Canada become citizens here? How many Americans overall take out citizenship in the country they land in?
How many Canadians take out citizenship in another country if they are there long enough? Is it greater or less than the rate of citizenship takeup for Canadians in the U.S.?

There's always been a lot of yakking about Bluetooth, the short-range wireless networking technology built into the very laptop computer I'm using; into millions of cell phones, PDAs and other info-gadgets but you know what? I've never known anyone — myself included — to actually transfer any data over a Bluetooth network! So I wasn't much surprised to read that Swedish phone giant, Ericsson — which helped invent Bluetooth — is shutting down the unit that was developing Bluetooth.
I'm sure someone somewhere was using Bluetooth and, lord knows, every Macintosh tip, and trick book I pick up talks about endless hacks you can do with your Bluetooth-enabled Mac. I'd always thought I was missing something but maybe I'm not. Do you use Bluetooth? Why? What for? Could you get by without it?

The Toronto Star has a new editor: Giles Gherson, formerly of the National Post and the Edmonton Journal, and currently the editor of Report On Business at the Globe and Mail, is the new Star editor, we've just learned over here on our side of Front Street.
Giles will have had a relatively short stay at the Globe, having been appointed to run the R.O.B. in December.
The Star has a press release on the appointment.

If you live in Toronto, the big news event of the day yesterday (and I'm sure this made several national newscasts), was the police shooting of an armed hostage taker.
My colleague Peter Murphy reported on this event for CTV National News. At that link, you can also find lots of video broadcast by our Toronto affiliate, CFTO. (If that link doesn't work, head here and look at the right hand side of the screen for all the video links)
Our cameras and cameras from other outlets in Toronto were on the scene at Toronto's Union Station well before a police sniper fired the shot that blew apart the hostage taker's head. A TV news crew from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in town for another feature, was looking down on the drama from their rooms in the Royal York Hotel across the street from Union. So this event was filmed from several angles by several crews many of which caught, in a very graphic medium close-up, the sniper's bullet entering and exiting the man's head.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of commuters and those in the surrounding office towers saw the event and the killing.
And yet, no broadcaster or print outlet I know of broadcast or published a photo which showed the actual moment of the man's death. If you watch the video of our piece (there's a link to the video above), you see the man and his hostage and then, just as you hear the sound of the rifle, the frame is frozen. The next image you see is a long-shot of the man lying on the pavement with police officers converging on his now lifeless body.
Having seen the unedited footage collected by our crews at the scene, I think this was the right way to treat this.
But some bloggers at a recent Toronto conference on Participatory Journalism, who believe Big Media has too much power, say things like this should be shown on TV, that we are censoring by omission. At this conference, we were talking about the video from Iraq that showed the beheading of the American hostage. That video ended up, in all its gory detail, on the Internet.
So far as I know, the gory details from yesterday's incident in Toronto have not been shown anywhere. (Please correct me if I'm wrong)
Is that the right call? I think it is.

[Hilarious report from AKMA — who is a priest and, I'm told, a pleasant soul — while vacationing in Maine]

A few minutes ago, a police officer passed the bench where I was sitting outside the [edit: Nantucket] Athenaeum, enjoying the mild temperature and the wifi signal, and he said, “Sir, you can’t use the Internet outside the library.”
I said, “What?” (I’m pretty clever under pressure.)
The officer in question (whose conduct was entirely professional, firm, and calm behind those mirrored shades) solemnly assured me that in order to use the library’s open wireless signal, I had to be seated within the library. The officer then wandered on back to the nearby police station.
I dutifully, if reluctantly, turned off the power to my Airport card and, since I had only been on the bench a few minutes, began working — offline — on what turns out to be this post. I had noticed two other weak but open signals in the area, and I figured that I could post this perplexing moment via one of the other open signals, then scuttle back to the studio. As I was writing, the officer returned and — as the officer walked straight for me — I held up my TiBook, pointing to the zero lines in the Airport icon, and showed the officer that my card was off.
“Why don’t you just close that up, sir, or use your computer elsewhere?’
I closed the computer in order not to constitute a threat to established order, but engaged this peace officer in a discussion of the complexities of the topic. “I did notice several other open signals in the area — am I allowed to connect to them?”“Maybe if you had permission it would be all right, but it’s a new law, sir; ‘theft of signal.’ It would be like if you stole someone’s cable TV connection.”
I responded, “But this is a radio signal thing — it’s not like a cable connection, it’s like someone has a porch light on and I’m sitting on the bench, reading a book by their light. I’m not stealing their light.”“It’s a law, sir; if someone comes along and downloads child photography (that wasn’t the exact word the officer used) and it goes through their [sc., the access point owner’s] connection, that’s a violation and we’ve had cases of that. That’s a felony.”(I skip the question of whether it’s less a problem if someone downloads such photos while sitting in the library.
Since I’ve already been categorized, however politely, with felons, I thought discretion should prevail at this point.) “Is this a state law?” I asked.“It’s a federal law, sir; a Secret Service agent came and explained it to us.”“Look, I don’t want to give you a hard time, and I’m very thankful that you alerted me to this, and I’ve done what you asked, but I’d be very surprised if there turned out to be a federal law forbidding my using an open wireless signal in a public place.”“Well, you can look it up, sir, and explain it to the chief. . . .”
At this point, it became clear that my uniformed interlocutor had to head in a different direction from me, so we shook hands and parted. And I walked back to the studio, dumbfounded that someone just rousted me for picking an open wireless signal in public — indeed (as it turns out) for using a laptop within a wireless signal’s range of the library. Weird.
posted from a secure hiding place near an open access point. . . .
[Rest of story: here, here, here, and if you haven’t seen Gary Turner’s coverage go here too.]

[AKMA’s Random Thoughts]

There are 600 million twenty dollar bills in circulation in Canada — more than any other denomination. Starting on Sept. 29, the Bank of Canada will start replacing every single one of them with a new bill. The new bill has a pile of anti-counterfeit measures. It also celebrates Canadian arts and culture and does so by including a quote from Franco-Manitoban author Gabriel Roy and by showing four pieces of art by Bill Reid. Queen Elizabeth II is on the bill, of course, and has been continuously since 1954. In fact, Elizabeth was on Canada's first-ever twenty issued in 1935. She was 9-year-old Princess Elizabeth at the time.
The new bill costs the Bank of Canada 9 cents each to print, up from about 6.5 cents from the current version, which debuted in 1991. The Bank, incidentally, spends more than $100-million a year on currency research, development, and printing. The design and development of the new twenty bill cost $12-million alone. I know all of this because I spent a few hours at a press conference on the subject yesterday for a brief report for CTV National News. My Globe and Mail colleague Peter Kennedy reported on the launch of the bill from Vancouver where the Bank organized its main news conference. Here's a direct link to the video.

Our company is trying to beef up our all-news cable channel, CTV Newsnet,but we'll need regulatory approval to do that. You'll get a chance soon to tell the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission what you think about the ideas outlined in this press release:

CTV News today filed an application with the CRTC that would enable it to overhaul CTV Newsnet to provide more original Canadian news programming and compete with the large number of foreign news networks that have entered the Canadian market in recent years. CTV Newsnet would still provide headline news service under the proposed plan.
“Since CTV Newsnet first went on the air seven years ago, there's been an explosion of news network choices for Canadians. Today there are nine English-language news networks, including American services CNN, CNN Headline News and CNBC, and the number is still growing, with Fox News being the latest to seek to enter the Canadian market,” said Robert Hurst, President, CTV News. “We believe more than ever that Canadians need and want strong Canadian news sources. That's why we want to enhance news programming for CTV Newsnet.
There is a strong, proven market for effective, clearly Canadian coverage of the day's headlines, with panel discussions, call-ins and live event broadcasts. That's what we want to do at CTV Newsnet.”
The broadcaster is seeking a change in its license conditions that requires it to maintain a 15-minute wheel format, subject to very limited exceptions. CTV Newsnet is the only English-language news service which operates under such a restriction; CNN and other American news network operating in Canada have no restrictions placed upon their coverage of the news.
“We are committed to maintaining a headline service,” said Hurst. “But we believe the current requirement is inflexible in the extreme — and in effect puts shackles on our ability to cover the headlines of the day and to give Canadians the kind of news programming they want. Moreover, in practice, it just doesn't make sense to shift from a breaking story to covering sports and entertainment headlines. What we're proposing is a sensible, flexible headline service that would permit us to make the basic newsroom, editorial decisions about what to put on the air and why — a right that every other English- language news service enjoys.
“What we are asking for is the right to compete fairly with other news networks,” said Hurst. “The right to make newsroom decisions based on news merit, not on stopwatch timings or other arbitrary criteria; the right, in this wired, globalized information age, to give our viewers a Canadian perspective on the news of the day.”
CTV News pointed to its successful experiment with the daily, hour-long COUNTDOWN: With Mike Duffy, election headlines show, hosted by Mike Duffy during the recent federal election. “The success of COUNTDOWN: With Mike Duffy proves that there is an audience for intelligent, fast-paced news programming,” said Hurst. “And that's the audience we want to serve.
COUNTDOWN: With Mike Duffy, with its panel discussions and audience interaction, is a template for the kind of headline programming we want to see more of on CTV Newsnet. We're not talking Antiques Road Show or Fashion File here — we're talking about hard news and current events in shows that have personality and point-of-view.”

Air Canada has been operating under court protection from its creditors for more than 17 months. Yesterday, in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, Justice James Farley signed off on the papers that will get the national airline out of bankruptcy protection on September 30. Bizarrely — even though Air Canada's shares which will be worthless in a few weeks (and the company itself has been saying so for months), someone is still trading the shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Shortly before it comes out of its restructuring, those shares will be delisted. Then, a new entity will take Air Canada's place. It will be called ACE Aviation Holdings Inc. — ACE standing for Air Canada Enterprises. ACE will be the holding company whose assets will be the operating units that include Air Canada and its sister airlines like Air Canada Jazz. Shares of ACE will be issued this fall.
I did a story on the latest Air Canada developments for CTV National News. The video link is down the right hand side of the page, under related video.
My Globe and Mail colleague Brent Jang also reported on yesterday's Air Canada developments.

Every day, newspapers around the country print page after page of stock price tables and other market data. Not only does that cost a lot of money but it leaves reporters with less space to tell neat stories. Today, The Globe and Mail takes a relatively risky gamble but one, I suspect, that more and more papers are likely to take over the next few years. The Globe will reduce the amount of market data it publishes in its business section by as much as three full pages. Instead, it has beefed up its Internet-based investment tracking and market data tools. As Giles Gherson, editor of the Globe's Report on Business says in today's paper, “In today's fast-moving market, investors need immediate pricing information to make their decisions and that's why, increasingly, they're turning to the Internet, and not the newspaper, to get it.”
The Globe has an excellent family of Web sites for business news, market data, and other investor information:

• Globeinvestor.com
• GlobeinvestorGOLD.com (Subscription required)
• Globefund.com
• globeandmail.com/marketclose.

“Our substantial presence on the Internet offers far more financial market data than we could ever publish in a newspaper,” Gherson wrote.
“Over the past several months, we've contacted nearly 2,000 of our readers to find out how much they use the pages of stock and financial listings we print. What we learned was what we already suspected: More and more of our readers are now relying on Globeinvestor.com and other websites for up-to-the-minute market price.”
This initiative makes particular sense for the Globe as the paper's readership tends to be more affluent and have higher education levels. Those two factors, combined with the fact that more than two-thirds of Canadian households have an Internet connection and greater than 90 per cent of Canadians have Internet access at either home, work or school, makes the likelihood of Globe Report on Business readers having ready access to the Net highly probable.