Ottawa copyright circles are buzzing with hints that the government is preparing its new revised copyright bill, and will be tabling it soon, perhaps as early as next week. And the buzz is that the new law will basically be a copy of the controversial U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

"...The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright powers, while suppressing public access to technology. But if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright to promote progress, for the benefit of the public then we must make changes in the other direction..."

Candidates for a unified theory justifying copyright in all its manifestations include the value of the copyright owner’s efforts in creating the work. This value can take a natural rights form – the value of genius – but it can also take the more mundane Lockean agricultural form – copyright owners are the sowers of their intellectual labor.

"The Canadian government has set up an online public consultation process to revise its copyright policy, running until September 13, 2009. If you live in Canada, now is your chance to take back your copyright law..."

The U.K. is looking to change copyright laws that make it illegal to copy music for personal use and for libraries to archive material under copyright.

"Brazil has just created the best-ever implementation of WIPO Copyright Treaty. In Brazil's version of the law, you can break DRM without breaking the law, provided you're not also committing a copyright violation. And what's more, any rightsholder who adds a DRM that restricts things that are allowed by Brazilian copyright laws ("fair dealing" or "fair use") faces a fine."

Canadian copyright law promises to dominate discussion in Ottawa over the coming weeks as hearings on Bill C-32, the controversial copyright bill, are set to begin within a few days.

It used to be that you could safely assume a work was public domain unless there was a highly visible warning printed on it, containing both the copyright owner and the date of copyright (at least in the USA). This system also ensured that, when the work’s copyright expired, you could tell from any copy that this was so—by simply adding the duration of copyright to the date printed in the work’s copyright notice. The Berne Convention, however, changed all that by replacing the assumption of freedom with the assumption of monopoly, and it now takes extensive research to be sure a work is public domain.

" The Free Software Foundation's Richard Stallman will speak on 'Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks' at 6:30 p.m. Feb. 4 at Cabrillo College....«Copyright developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press,» Stallman said. «But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it…if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright—to promote progress, for the benefit of the public—then we must make changes in the other direction.» ..."