I’ve been meaning to write about this past Tuesday’s Fair Copyright for Canadians Meet & Greet event at the Gladstone – however a few things came up in the meantime (a blizzard, a power outage, a road trip to Kingston, a 24-hr LAN party, and a craving for homemade baked goods, among other things).

The event was hosted by the Toronto chapter of the Fair Copyright for Canadians Facebook Group, and despite the location and weather, a good turnout of people from various backgrounds showed up to chat, voice their concerns, and in my case, learn more about the issues at hand. Pat (coastwise) and myself spoke with a few of the attendees to discuss why they cared about the potential copyright legislation that looms over our country. We met Ren Bucholz of the EFF, an organizer, who was very helpful in explaining more about the inner workings of the potential copyright bill, and the American DMCA. Other organizers included Jason Crocker and Mike Craigen, who are vocal about the implications the bill would have, among which could be a crackdown on their console hardware mod service. Pat has a great write-up of the event on his blog, as does Technology lawyer and blogger Rob Hyndman. Rob seemed very pleased about the turnout from younger people and their interest in the subject:

My main takeaway from the evening was much more than I’d expected – I met several young people who are deeply interested in this issue and startlingly well-informed. Honestly, if you’d told me 20 years ago that a day would come when copyright reform would figure prominently as a public policy issue for young Canadians I’d have scoffed. But here we are, and here they are, and they’re bright, focused, well-informed – and they care. I left the event with a spring in my step, convinced that tomorrow is going to be a better day.

Another conversation which was had involved the business model of corporations which deal with intellectual property and media, and how it should be marketed and sold. It is evident that whether we’re talking about the music industry or Hollywood, we’re talking about dinosaurs – their business model is embarrassingly outdated. Coincidentally, I read a passage from Kurzweil‘s The Singularity is Near the other day regarding intellectual property:

In music, for example, rather than provide leadership with new paradigms, the recording industry stuck rigidly (until just recently) with the idea of an expensive record album, a business model that has remained unchanged from the time my father was a young, struggling musician in the 1940s. The public will avoid wide-scale pirating of information services only if commercial prices are kept at what are perceived to be reasonable levels. The mobile-phone sector is a prime example of an industry that has fallen rapidly with improving technology. If the mobile phone industry had kept calling rates at the level where they weer when I was a child (a time when people dropped whatever they were doing at the rare times that someone called long distance), we would be seeing comparable pirating of cell-phone calls, which is technically no more difficult than pirating music. But cheating on cell-phone calls is widely regarded as criminal behavior, largely because of the general perception that cell-phone charges are appropriate.

It seems that services like eMusic and Amie Street are leading the way in this regards, and we’ll hope that the big guys follow suit, and ideally leave the clunky DRM and device-restrictions at the door. In terms of access to information, those of us in Canada still have to suffer from high prices for mobile internet access and texting services, and expensive internet access in general (for relatively slow internet connections – when you consider Japan or Scandinavia). I’d like to see these services improve – then maybe I’ll consider getting a mobile device.

In summary, it was great to hear the opinions of such a mix of people, and I’ll be looking forward to potential further meetings and conversations. Thanks to Fenwick of the Infoscape Research Lab for letting me know about the event!