maple’s.fortunes

Industry Minister Jim Prentice introduced his new copyright legislation today and it is not good.

As expected, the Canadian DMCA is big, complicated, and a close model of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (Industry Canada provides a large number of fact sheets here).  I’ll have much more to say once I’ve had a careful read, but these are my five key points to take away:

1.   As expected, Prentice has provided a series of attention-grabbing provisions to consumers including time shifting, private copying of music (transferring a song to your iPod), and format shifting (changing format from analog to digital).  These are good provisions that did not exist in the delayed December bill.  However, check the fine print since the rules are subject to a host of strict limitations and, more importantly, undermined by the digital lock provisions.  The effect of the digital lock provisions is to render these rights virtually meaningless in the digital environment because anything that is locked down (ie. copy-controlled CD, no-copy mandate on a digital television broadcast) cannot be copied. As for every day activities like transferring a DVD to your iPod - those are infringing too. Indeed, the law makes it an infringement to circumvent the locks for these purposes.

2.   The digital lock provisions are worse than the DMCA.  Yes - worse.  The law creates a blanket prohibition on circumvention with very limited exceptions and creates a ban against distributing the tools that can be used to circumvent.  While Prentice could have adopted a more balanced approach (as New Zealand and Canada’s Bill C-60 did), the effect of these provisions will be to make Canadians infringers for a host of activities that are common today including watching out-of-region-coded DVDs, copying and pasting materials from a DRM’d book, or even unlocking a cellphone.

While that is the similar to the U.S. law, the exceptions are worse.  The Canadian law includes a few limited exceptions for privacy, encryption research, interoperable computer programs, people with sight disabilities, and security, yet Canadians can’t actually use these exceptions since the tools needed to pick the digital lock in order to protect their privacy are banned.  In other words, check the fine print again - you can protect your privacy but the tools to do so are now illegal.  Dig deeper and it gets worse.  Under the U.S. law, there is mandatory review process every three years to identify new exceptions.  Under the Canadian law, its up to the government to introduce new exceptions if it thinks it is needed. Overall, these anti-circumvention provisions go far beyond what is needed to comply with the WIPO Internet treaties and represents an astonishing abdication of the principles of copyright balance that have guided Canadian policy for many years.

3.   The other headline grabber is the $500 fine for private use infringement.  This will be heralded as a reasonable compromise, but check the fine print.  Canadian law already allows a court to order damages below $500 per infringement, so the change may not be as dramatic as expected (though $500 in damages is the maximum for private use infringement).  Moreover, it is already arguably legal to download sound recordings in Canada.  Under the proposal, there are exceptions for uploading or posting music online (ie. making available) and even the suggestion that posting a copyright-protected work to YouTube could result in the larger $20,000 per infringement damage award.

4.   The ISP provisions are precisely as expected with a statutory notice-and-notice system.  However, check the fine print.  The role of the ISP may be undermined by the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which the government trumpets in its press release.

5.   The education community received several provisions that are largely gutted by the fine print.  For example, library materials can be distributed in electronic form, but must not extend beyond five days.  In other words, it turns librarians into locksmiths.  Moreover, there is an Internet exception that educators wanted but it does not apply for any works that are either password protected or include a notification that they cannot be used.  In other words, online materials that are available under a Creative Commons license are fair game (as they are already), but most everything else is still potentially subject to a restriction.  This was precisely what many feared - rather than pursuing the far superior expansion of fair dealing, the education community got a provision that does little to enhance classroom learning.

I’ll have more to say soon, but the takeaway is that the DMCA provisions are worse than the U.S. and the consumer exceptions riddled with limitations as the government promotes a strategy of locking down content and launching lawsuits against Internet users.

Michael Geist - The Canadian DMCA: Check the Fine Print

This legislation must be stopped. There is a new letter to send. This one is sent to your MP, Industry Minister Jim Prentice and Heritage Minister Josée Verner. To send it click here.

I have recently been in contact with a member of Dr. Neil Brown’s staff, Rob, in regards to using some of my photos in one of their publications. Who is Dr. Neil Brown you ask. He is the MLA for Calgary-Nose Hill. They contacted me through flickr. If this works out, it would be my first real publication. I have photos in other things, like the Schmap Calgary map thing and other online publications, but this would be the first real printed publication. I’m pretty excited.

I have to phone Rob again tomorrow to work out all the details, but other than that it should be good to go. I’ll keep you guys updated.

It looks like Industry Minister Jim Prentice will introduce his new copyright reform bill tomorrow.

Multiple sources advise that Industry Minister Jim Prentice’s current plan is to introduce the Canadian DMCA this week, likely on Wednesday.  While things could change, it would appear that Prentice’s communication strategy is to do as little communicating as possible. Plans for a possible press conference have apparently been put on hold given concerns that the press might actually ask questions and Prentice has even entertained thoughts of shuffling the bill quickly to a committee for summer hearings so that he would not have to deal with the issue all summer long. The Minister will also head for Japan and South Korea late the following week as part of the OECD Future of the Internet Economy conference, so out-of-sight, out-of-mind.

Michael Geist - The Unoffical Canadian DMCA Background Document

I recommend that you read his post in its entirety. He lists what he expects to be in the bill and things that Mr. Prentice likely won’t talk about. Canada needs balanced copyright reform and adopting a US-style DMCA is not the answer. From what I’ve heard and read about the bill, it is not looking good. We need to act now in order to prevent this bill from becoming law and to give Canada a chance at fair and balanced copyright reform. I urge you to write to your MP, the Prime Minister, Industry Minister Jim Prentice, and Heritage Minister Josée Verner. One way of doing this is to use this pre-written letter and use the form on that page to send it via email. I would also recommend printing it out and mailing it. Letters mailed to Parliament/MPs/Ministers do not require postage. Simply print it off, put it in an envelope, address it and drop it in the mail box.

If you don’t know who your MP is, you can find out by clicking here and entering your postal code. Please send a letter. We were able to stop Mr. Prentice’s bill in December and we can do it again.

Well, I have more videos to share. The first one is one of my projects for my video arts class back in high school. The second one is another time lapse, which some of you have seen. When I posted those other two videos on here, I got a lot more traffic, so I am hoping to do the same with the other time lapse. The first video is on Youtube, the other on Vimeo. I put the music video on Youtube because I thought it might get more views. I like Vimeo better though. Anyway, enjoy!

This one is a music video for Rise Against’s “Swing Life Away”.

This is a trip up to the University. Normally, I wouldn’t go this way because it takes longer, but the way I do go isn’t nearly as exciting. The music in this one is by me. The full version is 1:30 long. If you want it for some strange reason, email me and you can have it.

Trip to the University from maple on Vimeo.

I recently decided to try my hand at some time lapse photography. Here are some of my results. In the first video, I used the continuous shooting mode on my Nikon D50. It was taken at the Devonian Gardens in downtown Calgary. For the second video, I used Nikon’s Camera Control Pro to control my camera, which had been rigged up in my truck.

Devonian Gardens from Joel Steeves on Vimeo.

Driving Time Lapse from Joel Steeves on Vimeo.

Parts of what follows below were actually painful to write. However, because of the ongoing misinformation campaigns launched by Miss Andrea Gallagher and her accomplices, I feel it is my duty to write this. When I first met Andrea Gallagher, she was a normal person. However, over time she has grown into a monster. Her cockamamie theories about the management of the sky-rocketing human population are well beyond the measures needed. She would have great atrocities befall the countries of the east, all so she could sit on her throne and watch as the poor, helpless people die. It is these actions that should be raising a warning flag in your head. If it does not, than perhaps it is time to re-evaluate your current psychological state.

Andrea may be formidable with words, but she lacks the capacity to truly understand the utter drivel she proclaims. What she lacks in intelligence, she makes up for in cunningness. While there are still some who can see through Andrea’s exaggerations and incorrect comparisons, she has been able to dupe a considerable amount of the world’s population into believing her, thus legitimizing her stance on numerous issues.  Andrea, in her infinite wisdom, has suggested that children don’t need as much psychological attentiveness, protection and obedience training as the treasured household pet. Although she has been proved wrong on numerous occasions, she continues to spew this misinformation as though it was fact. It is truly scary how incapable of logical reasoning Andrea is. She contends that science is merely a tool invented by the current elite to maintain power. Excuse me, but where exactly did this little factoid come from?

In an Andrea-led society, those who focus on the major economic, social and political forces that provide the setting for the expression of a scary agenda will be suppressed, vilified, hated, imprisoned, exiled and killed. Is this the kind of society that we want to live in? Unfortunately, Andrea has been able to glaze over these details and convince the majority of the human population that, yes, this is the kind of world they’d like to live in. It is her constant floccinaucinihilipilification of advice from prominent and knowledgeable individuals that has led to her current state. She continues to berate her opposition, portraying them in the media as ignorant, moronic imbeciles.

Andrea’s obsequious minions are everywhere, propagating her fabrications and deceptions. She has people doing her dirty work in every country of this great earth. There is no escape from her ever-present ideas. She is constantly expressing her belief that people should be appraised by their number of material possessions and the amount of money they have instead of their internal values and achievements. It is frightening to envision the dystopian future that will be if Andrea has her way. What is even more frightening is the staggering amount of people that fail to see through her very optimistic speeches and policy.

While I must admit that our society is in need of a change, Andrea’s plan for the future is not the right one. She is self-centered and egotistical, only thinking about how she can benefit herself. Although she would have us believe that she is a caring individual, this is nothing more than a charade. That lie is a transparent and strained effort to keep us from noticing that she seizes every opportunity to introduce absurd, baseless, terror-ridden lawsuits intended to destroy the lives of countless innocent people. I cannot believe this colossal clownishness and neither should you.

As we cruised through Crowsnest Pass on Friday night on our way to Montana, we came upon a long line of cars. The weather had taken a turn for the worse as we reached the mountains. It had begun to snow and it was evening, which was quickly turning into night. I was riding with my sister and we were ahead of my parents, who had stopped in Lethbridge. We came to a stop on top of a very big hill, with cars all the way down. The truck in front of us had tried to stop but was unable. He swerved into oncoming traffic to avoid rear-ending the car in front of him. He still couldn’t stop and there was a car coming up the hill. I thought we were going to see an accident. Luckily, he was able to stop and get back into the proper lane before the other car got there.

Once we came to a stop, we didn’t move for a long time. After a while people started getting out of their vehicles to see what was going on. We figured that there must have been an accident up ahead somewhere. We sat there for at least an hour and a half. There was no cars coming the other way except people that had turned around. We saw two ambulances come up the hill, one with lights flashing, the other without. A little later an ambulance came the other way with its lights flashing, which we thought was a little strange. We thought there might have been another accident. After at least an hour and a half, we started moving. We only got about a kilometer before we came to a halt again. We sat here again for a long time.

We finally started moving again and got on our way. We sat there for at least two and a half hours while they investigated the crash. We had heard that someone had died, but didn’t know that for sure. We found out yesterday that a woman had died in the accident. It was a head-on collision involving two vehicles and seven people.

My parents were nine kilometers behind us and the accident was about two kilometers in front of us. That means at the very least there was eleven kilometers of stopped cars, semis and buses. My mom said there was lots of cars behind them, so it was probably bigger than eleven kilometers. That is pretty crazy.

Wednesday night was the Collective Soul concert here in Calgary. If you know anything about me, you know that Collective Soul is by far my favourite band. This was exciting stuff. They played at Flames Central and I didn’t think it was going to be very big. For those of you who don’t know where Flames Central is, it is basically on 1st Street and Stephan Ave (8th Ave). If that doesn’t mean anything to you and you really want to know where it is, go look at a Google Map. Anyway, we drove down 2nd Street hoping to find a parking meter, which I didn’t actually expect to find. As expected, we didn’t find one. We did, however, find on on 3rd St and about 7th Ave. Anyway, that isn’t the point. As we drove down 2nd St we noticed the people lined up to get in. Both Cassandra and I thought that that many people surely couldn’t fit in Flames Central. By the time we got parked and walked down there and got in line, we were basically at 9th Ave. That’s a long line.

When we finally got inside, we were both very surprised at how big it actually was. It is a really cool place. We had VIP tickets, which meant we got to meet Collective Soul. We really weren’t sure how it was all going to go down, because the email I got about it was pretty fuzzy on the details. We decided to ask someone, but got sidetracked by the merchandise. I decided to ask the cashier lady, but she didn’t know anything. I bought my shirt and we decided to just wait until 9: 30. That didn’t happen. At around 9:15, we decided to go find someone else. We found a security guard to ask, and he thought I was asking about the band when I said “Meet and Greet.” When we finally got him to understand what we wanted he directed us to the guy by the door who we wanted to talk to originally. We talked to him and he told use where to go.

After some waiting we were led upstairs to the VIP lounge-type area. When they came in, we still weren’t sure how it was all going to work. I had heard that it was like a wedding reception and that was exactly what it was like. We were one of the first people through. We just went through and introduced ourselves and said hello. After we went through, we noticed that everyone else was taking pictures and getting autographs and stuff. We felt pretty ripped off, so we went through again.

We got to stay up there for the rest of the concert, which was awesome. The concert was really good. We had a lot of fun.

This is by far the coolest time lapse video I have ever seen. The guy who did, Ross Ching, went out to a bunch of different places and took photos at certain time intervals. He then edited them into one really cool time lapse video. It is definitely worth checking out.

The entire movie was shot using a digital SLR still camera and pieced together using Quicktime Pro and Final cut Pro. Since it was shot on a still camera, all the raw footage is 1080p HD.

Check it out at RossChing.com

Remember this? Yeah, fun times eh? Well, I put in a warranty claim and it was accepted and I was told to ship it to Seagate’s warranty department. Unlike other tech companies I’ve had to deal with, I had to pay for the shipping. They didn’t send out a box, and they sure didn’t pay for it. It cost me $50 to Fed Ex that piece of crap to them. And I couldn’t just send it regular mail because they said that it had to have insurance and a tracking number (which is fine, because I wanted that too). Plus, they had all these stupid packing guidelines, like it had to be in an ESD bag, which is an electrostatic discharge bag. I was not to happy about that. I mean, it’s not like I just happen to have one of those lying around. It isn’t even necessary since the drive is an external, so it should already be protected from static. If it was internal drive then I would understand, but it wasn’t. After talking to a customer service rep over their website chat thing, I decided to just ship it in its original packaging. The guy said that would be okay. Well, I get it shipped off and I see that they received it on October 15th, 2007 thanks to my Fed Ex tracking number. I didn’t expect it to take very long.

A day or so after I knew they had received it, I checked on their website to see what it’s status was. I wasn’t expecting it to be shipping or anything, but I sure didn’t expect what I saw. My order was somehow canceled. So they had my stupid Maxtor One Touch III 300 GB hard drive and my order got canceled. Right. I phoned them and was told that after a certain amount of time if they do not receive the drive they cancel the order. They guy said he would reopen it and hopefully the problem would resolve itself. Yeah, that didn’t happen.

I kept checking the website and it still said they hadn’t received it. I was getting pretty fed up at this point. After a few weeks I phoned back and told the customer service rep my story. He asked for my tracking number and then went to check out the situation. He came back and acknowledged from the tracking number that they had received it. He said that he would elevate the importance of the issue and that it should be resolved in a couple of days. Well, it didn’t. I phoned back and had to retell my whole story. By now they had had my hard drive for a month and there had been no action. It still said they had not received it.

The guy I talked to this time, again asked for my tracking number. He went away and came back only to tell me basically the same thing the last guy said. He said that it had been transfered to another department and they were waiting from a response from that department. A couple of hours later the customer service rep phones me to tell me that the tracking number I gave him was invalid. I reconfirmed the tracking number and he still said it was invalid. I was looking at the Fed Ex tracking page as I was on the phone with him, so I knew that it wasn’t. As it turns out, he somehow got Canada Post out of Fed Ex. After we got that sorted out, he said it would be like a week or two.

It is now two months later and I still haven’t received my drive. The website still says they haven’t got it yet, and it is once again canceled. I phone them again. I get to go through the song and dance once again. This guy tells me to phone back in a few days and hopefully by that time it will be resolved. Well, it was right around Christmas, so I couldn’t phone in a couple of days. When I finally get around to it, it is now January and they have had my drive for three months. By now I have phoned them at least 5 times and I would have thought that my story would have been in the file for this return. Was it? No. I had to retell it to the guy. I had to give him my tracking number again. No wonder nothing happened, they didn’t ever seem to record anything. It was like I had never phoned.

I told this guy my whole story and how I had phoned in numerous times before and how unhappy I was. He said that the tracking number checks out and that they did receive it and that he would re-prioritize it. The next day I checked the website and finally it said something different. No longer did it say open or canceled, it said “In process”. Last Friday I received a shipping notice from Seagate. They had finally shipped a replacement. I got it yesterday and it has been three and a half months since they received it.

This has been the worst customer service experience I’ve ever had. It far exceeds that of Xbox’s in terms of crappiness. It makes me so mad to think that something that should have taken a couple weeks tops took three and a half months. What really made it annoying was that when ever I phoned Seagate I had to re-explain everything. You would think that the first time I contacted them they would have added all that information into the RMA report, but apparently not.

I realized as I was taking photos for this article that they sent me a 500 GB drive instead of the 300 GB version that I sent them. I guess that is their way of compensating for how long this took. I’ll take it, but I’m still not very happy about this whole situation.

In the time that I have been without this hard drive, I have purchased two other small external drives. Now with the 500 GB drive I have over 1 TB of storage at home and a 1 TB server. I don’t think I’ll be running out of space any time soon.