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.

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.

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.

I am pleased to present to you, my fine readers, my latest web development project. Over the last little while I have been working on a redesign for my sister’s Music for Children business website. Without further ado, here it is:

The design is based on one of my favourite OSWD designs, Pat Heard’s lazydays. I love the original design and I love our modified design. I did a lot of the graphical work for our design, which isn’t something I normally do. I got some new software, as you are probably aware from my last post, which made it really easy to do. The one thing that was surprising hard was making the grass. It took a long time, but in the end it was worth it.

I am really happy with the way this website turned out. Just as before, it is powered by WordPress. I love WordPress, I use it for everything I can. If you haven’t tried it, I’d give it a shot.

If you want to check out the site for reals, you can find it at http://www.musicforchildren.ca.

You only have 2 days and 23 hours left to purchase this amazing bundle of great software. Okay, so really I bought it for Pixelmator. I don’t know how many of the other apps I am going to buy. I guess to produce the screenshot below I used one of the programs, Snapz Pro X. Anyway, this post is really going to be about Pixelmator.

Pixelmator, for those of you not in the know, is an image editor like Photoshop. I haven’t used Photoshop in, quite literally, years, so I don’t think I can rightfully compare the two. I have been using GIMP quite extensively over the past couple years though. I really like GIMP, especially considering the price tag - free. I mean, how can you beat that? You can’t. So, if you are in the market for a good image editor and you don’t want to pay, I’d say GIMP is your best bet there.

One of the main problems that I have with GIMP is its lack of a proper Mac port. See, the way it currently works is that GIMP runs through X11 for Mac, which is an implementation of the X Window System that allows X11 based programs to be run in OS X. I really don’t like having to go through X11, it is a big pain.

Anyway, I have had my eye on Pixelmator for the last little while, but like a lot of other people out there, I’m pretty cheap. I didn’t really want to spend money on it, especially when I have a program that does the same thing and I got it for free. Well, when I saw that it was in the new MacHeist bundle, I really wanted it. After an intense battle inside my brain, I decided to purchase the bundle. I really wanted Pixelmator and I was getting it for cheaper than normal and I got 10 or so other apps. Plus, 25% of my purchase went to charity (the World Wildlife Fund in my case.)

I really like it. I especially like the UI. I find it very easy to use and very powerful. I had to make some grass for a web project that I’m working on and Pixelmator was my best friend. I’m sure GIMP would have done just a good of job, but I wouldn’t have been as happy as I was in the process.

Basically, I love it and would highly recommend it. If you are in looking into the MacHeist bundle and are thinkg of purchasing, may I provide a link? Good, because here it is.

MacHeist Bundle - click me and order!

So, here is the deal. If one persons clicks above and buys the bundle, I get one extra app. If two people click and buy then I get two extra apps. After that it doesn’t really matter. Except that they need to raise $31, 739 more for charity so that the VectorDesigner app is unlocked, which I want, so you should go buy a bundle. Just think of the 25% that goes to charity.

I was reading Slashdot this morning and I came across this little gem. These wonderful folks over at Dozier Internet Law (oops, I wasn’t supposed to do that) have such a great privacy policy/user agreement.

We also own all of the code, including the HTML code, and all content. As you may know, you can view the HTML code with a standard browser. We do not permit you to view such code since we consider it to be our intellectual property protected by the copyright laws. You are therefore not authorized to do so.

I don’t even know where to begin with this. How can you ban someone from looking at your source code? When someone looks at your web site, they download a temporary copy into their cache. Gasp! I wonder how these lawyers feel about that. I’d go as far as to say that is piracy. I mean, come on, that is ridiculous.

If you take a gander at their code, you’ll find a disaster zone. Who ever wrote that should not be allowed to create web pages. First of all, they don’t have a Doctype. How can you call yourself professional when you don’t have a Doctype? Plus, their site is all tables. Everything seems to be in a table, with nested tables too. Do they not know how to use CSS?

This post has nothing to do with the title, as I’m sure you’ve already figured out. I like random titles.

Before I left on my trip, I bought a new 19″ LG Widescreen LCD. I bought it the day before we left, so I didn’t really get to play with it that much. I’ve now been home for a few days and have had time to use it. I love it. It is so sharp and clear. It has a 2ms response time, so it is really fast. Overall, I’m really pleased. I’ll post a picture of my new setup when I clean up my desk, which I was hoping to do today, but I didn’t.

I started writing this post a while ago and in that time, I’ve got some other new toys. The first is my new friend Issac, a black MacBook. I upgraded the RAM to 2 GB instead of the standard 1 GB. So far, I’m really enjoying it. My old iBook was having some problems, so i decided it was time for a new one. Yuri’s DVD drive didn’t work anymore. When I stuck a disc in it would stop recognizing the drive. This made it really hard to get the disk out. I’m surprised I ever did. I think it was mostly luck. Yuri’s battery is also shot, so that kind of defeats the purpose of a laptop.

My other new toy is the Halo 3 Legendary edition. I got it last Monday night at 7 PM, so 5 hours before everyone else. It was pretty sweet. I beat the game on normal difficulty by Tuesday night. I’m now almost done Heroic. If I didn’t have a stupid philosophy project, I would have had it beaten on Heroic by now. I’ve found all the skulls and the terminals. That was pretty fun. I was really impressed with this game. The graphics are awesome! There are some really cool new features in Halo 3, like the Theater. You can go in and watch previous games, including campaign. While watching, you can fly around and check everything out. You can take screenshots and upload them to Bungie.net. You can then share this replay with your friends. It is really cool. The map editor, Forge, is also really cool. I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it, but when I did, I thought it was really cool.

I’ll post pictures of my fun new toys when I get a moment.