Justice Minister and DRM Recap

If I hadn't been so distracted I would have gotten back to commenting about how my meeting with Vic Towes went sooner.

It wasn't what I expected but then again Vic isn't your regular politician, he was very easy to talk to and was aware of the concerns I was addressing. We only talked for about 20 minutes and while he didn't promise that things would change he did sympathise.

He mentioned that radio stations were asking the government for change. Apparently if you use a computer to play a song (that you legitametly own) on the radio you get charged an extra fee and there isn't any rationel as to why. Vic said that he believes that media you should have full use of media that you purchase, which is good news for us in the anti-DRM camp.

I gave him all the research I prinited out before meeting with him and he said he would look it over (he was very interested in the statement the Canadian Music Creators Coalition sent to the government). One thing Vic said though, was that this issue with DRM and the like is up to Bev Oda to decide how Canada will respond to the question of DRM.

Captain Copyright

Those of you who have been paying attention to BoingBoing will know that Captain Copyright is a propagandous cartoon hero who gives children a distored view of copyright law link.

A continuing article on BoingBoing pointed out that Captain Copyright was not correctly citing Wikipedia. The horror and irony of it all! link

It was at that point that I decided to put in my two cents. I e-mailed Access Copyright ( the organization behind Captain Copyright ) and informed them that their citations were not to Wikipedia standards and that because of the policy of their site restricts the use of the GFDL they should remove their Wikipedia Citations.

After a week of not getting back from them I figured my complaint fell on deaf ears, that is until I noticed that all the citations on the Captain Copyright site had been removed.

I have no recieved a reply from Access Canada:
Thank you for taking the time to email us with your concerns.

I can assure you that Access Copyright has nothing but the utmost
respect for Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation. In fact, earlier
this year we announced that we were working with Creative Commons
Canada, Creative Commons Corporation in the US, and the Wikimedia
Foundation on a public domain registry that will create an online,
globally searchable catalogue of published works that are in the
Canadian public domain. As soon as we found out that the credits on the
Captain Copyright site for the information from Wikipedia did not follow
their guidelines, we took action. The material was removed so that it
would not remain online while we corrected the credits according to
Wikipedia's GNU license.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to email us. We appreciate
the constructive feedback we have received.

Sincerely,
Maureen Cavan
Executive Director
Access Copyright

Part of me thinks that these guys spent the two weeks it took to get back to me researching to figure out what the hell I was talking about.