Alec Saunders SquawkBox

I'm experiencing a kind of a flashback in the Canadian Institute Social Media conference this morning.  The current speaker is Barnaby Jeans, Microsoft's lead guy focused on developers in Canada.  His team uses social media to engage developers in the Canadian marketplace.  This was my job in 1992!  Blogs didn't exist, so we engaged developers on bulletin board networks (does anybody remember Canada Remote Systems?), email, and Compuserve.  And today, Barnaby's team is focused on nearly 200,000 developers in Canada, whereas in my day there was a paltry 65,000.

The more it changes…

Shortly the Canadian parliament will have legislation introduced which is similar to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. You can find out more about this on Michael Geist's blog (the Canadian DMCA: What You Can Do), and via the Facebook group that he has created - the Fair Copyright group.  Geist is an advocate for fair copyright laws, in addition to being a professor at the University of Ottawa.  He's also one of the foremost experts globally on topics like privacy and copyright.

The proposed law will eliminate time shifting (goodbye PVR's and taping shows to watch later),  make it illegal to RIP a CD and play it on your PC, and make it illegal to make a backup copy of that CD.  The irony of this is that as the music industry is finally coming to terms with the damage that their actions have caused in the American market, our own government is about to embark on the same path.

It's bad legislation. It will make criminals of millions of law abiding Canadians.  Your member of parliament needs to hear from you today.