Michael Geist has written another great piece encouraging balanced copyright reform.
I still find it surprising that the Liberal led Heritage committee is so biased towards the content creators. Content creation groups have apparently out numbered content user groups at these hearings by a wide margin. How can this be right? Surely, there are more people using copyrighted material than there are creators. It’s odd how governments can forget who they actually represent.
I think the biggest obstacle to reasonable discussions on intellectual property issues is that it is very easy to quantify what more restrictive laws will do for the content creators; it’s all money. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to quantify the loss that is incurred throughout our culture by these same laws. What is the cost of works not entering the public domain? What interesting new industries could be formed by freed content? What is the cost when a school teacher cannot adequately teach her students? These are all next to impossible to quantify.
People like simple things. I believe our governmental representatives are no exception. Perhaps they are just leaning towards what they actually can get a mental grip on.
