The word this afternoon is that Industry Minister Jim Prentice will not introduce the Canadian DMCA tomorrow. The thousands of letters and phone calls over the past week have urged the government to adopt balanced copyright reforms that meets everyone's needs and does not unduly harm education, consumer rights, privacy, and free speech.

"Secret copyright treaty leaks. It's bad. Very bad."
This was the headline used by Cory Doctorow to break the news about ACTA to an unsuspecting Internet on November 3rd, 2009...

In his 2007 charitable giving guide, Science-fiction author Cory Doctorow writes:

"It's wonderful to see a campaigning group based on fighting DRM. Defective by Design has pulled off a number of audacious and clever actions that have raised public awareness of DRM. The fight starts here."

With the Canadian version of the DMCA likely to be introduced within the next two weeks, there has a remarkable outpouring of interest from individual Canadians about what they can do to have their concerns heard.

Despite more than 20,000 lawsuits filed against music fans in the years since they started finding free tunes online rather than buying CDs from record companies, the recording industry has utterly failed to halt the decline of the record album or the rise of digital music sharing.

MPEG-4 AVC (H.264), the efficient, open industry standard for video encoding, has made huge strides to become the industry leader in all areas – it plays on mobiles and MP3 players, it's used by HDTV and Blu-ray Discs, and cameras and HD camcorders record in it.

Great post by Cory Doctorow on the copyfight, battles at WIPO, and the future fight over ACTA.

Cory Doctorow just gets it. Here is what he said about copyright accusations. “The Internet’s a single wire that delivers freedom of speech, of assembly and of the press — it’s a conduit for civic engagement, health care, employment, education, distant family, love and life.

So, Microsoft gives customers of now defunct MSN Music a final farewell kick in the teeth by pulling the plug on any future downloads or license activations. Your existing music will work until the authorized PC dies, after which it’s back to the store to repurchase the music.