where are all the women?
What I want to know is, why aren’t more women involved in politics?
Or the sciences? I just listened to my first “Free As in Freedom” podcast which turned out to be a conversation between two free software legal eagles @bkuhn and @Kaz discussing gender inequity. I was surprised to learn that Karen Sandler feels insecure about public speaking, since this amazing woman gave one of the most powerful free software talks I’ve been privileged to see, “Free Software on Medical Devices: Unchain My Heart”
gender equality
Marlo Thomas
What happened to the world I grew up in?
You know, the one I’m talking about, the one that was ushering in gender equality?
As a teen I felt empowered by the classic Marlo Thomas television special “Free To Be, You and Me” My high school drama department class even mounted Free To Be You and Me as a show.
socialization
When I was a kid, my favorite team sport was soccer, and that turned out to be the sport my son wanted to participate in. He loved the game, and played for fun in the co-ed “house league” throughout his public school years. But when he was in high school, the league began segregating the younger teams according to gender. I asked why, and was told it was to make sure that girls got to play as much as the boys.
That’s a shame.
I don’t think such a policy is particularly good for either boys or girls. Some of the best soccer players my son played with were girls. As a parent watching all the games, I always saw at the beginning of each season, there were always some boys and some girls who seemed a little uncomfortable playing together. Boys wouldn’t pass to girls, for instance. And maybe some of the girls lacked the confidence to fight boy players for possession of the ball. But by the end of every season, every year, the boys and girls were working together. It was necessary if your team was going to have a shot at winning. And the one thing that the boys and girls had in common was the desire to win.
Segregating the teams by gender might make it easier for girls to play the game, but does them no favors for later. There are few career paths available to women that are devoid of men, outside of nunneries. From my perspective, the most important thing to come out of co-ed soccer was an opportunity for boys and girls to work together and discover they are all people.
Maybe if we had more of that in the places where we socialize our kids, we would have more women in politics.
When it comes to online social networks, particularly the ones seeking to bring about social justice, there certainly seem to be at least as many women fighting for change than men. Maybe more. When you look at any political party, how many of the rank and file, the volunteers, the workers, are women? So why aren’t women more involved in making policy and governance?
Capital “F” feminism
Liberal Aboriginal Affairs critic Dr. Carolyn Bennett
I used to consider myself a feminist, until I became disillusioned when the feminist movement seemed to be less about gender equality and more about a power reversal to seize the power that men traditionally held. So I stopped thinking of myself as a feminist, even though I think that everyone should have equal rights, regardless of gender, skin colour, sexual orientation, or planet of origin.
Every human should have equal rights, no matter what our differences. Period. Does that make me a humanist? Human, anyway. But today I’m considering gender. I realize now I was lucky to grow up in a large family where the girls and boys were treated pretty much equally, with a father who was very supportive of whatever any of us wanted to do or be.
Men and women are all people, we all make mistakes, and you can’t generalize about an entire gender. Sometimes men behave badly, but women aren’t any more perfect than men. Blaming everything that’s wrong in the world on one gender or the other doesn’t help. Blaming doesn’t generally fix anything. Clearly some of the women who have become political leaders have been terrible, just like some male political leaders. It’s even possible that women might screw up even worse that men when it comes to governing nations, maybe because of the way we have been socialized or simply because we lack experience. I don’t know.
Cathy MacLellan, 2009 and 2011 Kitchener-Waterloo Green Party Candidate
As a woman, I’ve tended toward female medical professionals whenever a choice is possible. The wonderful Toronto Women’s College Hospital came into existence to ensure women received proper medical treatment; but the female obstetrician who worked out of WCH was more paternalistic than any male doctor I’ve ever seen. When I asked her questions – pregnancy was a new experience for me – she ordered me to stop reading and to just do as I was told. So in my third trimester I switched to a male obstetrician (and this is unheard of) to make sure I would deliver my child across the street at Mount Sinai.
Men and women are different.
Well, of course we are. People are different. We all have different strengths and weaknesses. We don’t always have the same goals, we often want different things. There are some things men seem to do better as there are some things women seem to do better. And it’s hard to know what gender differences are due to nature and which are due to nurture. But a lot of those things are from the the way we socialize our children.
democracy
Democratic government is all well and good, but in order to be truly representative, a democratic government really should come close to reflecting the populace. If you look at the Members of Parliament who are supposed to represent us at the federal level, that isn’t anywhere close to the case gender wise. Although the Canadian population is slightly more than 50 percent female, the House of Commons is barely managing 25% women. Well, 24.7 since the most recent Federal election.
What Canada actually has is a Conservative Party majority government. Yet only 17% of Conservative MPs are women. Lets look at the breakdown within each party:
In total, Canada currently has 76 (or 24.7%) women sitting in the House of Commons.
- 40 of them (or 13%) are from the NDP,
- 28 of them (or 9%) are from the Conservative Party,
- 6 of them (or 2%) are from the Liberal Party,
- 1 pf them (or 0.3%) is from the Bloc Québécois, and
- 1 of them (or 0.3%) is from the Green Party.
So although the numbers are up for women in government, only 9% are in the majority party. And of the five national political parties represented in our government, only the Green Party has a woman leader.
Canada has only had one female Prime Minister, whose term ran for mere days as she was appointed and left holding the bag for Brian Mulroney’s misguided policies. Campbell would probably have done a better job than Mulroney had she got the position at the beginning rather than the end. (Admittedly, my cat could have done a better job than Brian Mulroney…)
Fairvote Canada's Anita Nickerson
Fairvote Canada‘s Anita Nickerson told me that Canada has “basically been at a “glass ceiling” of 20-22% women for the past 20 years.” What changed in the last Federal election was that the “Orange Crush” bumped up our gender numbers dramatically up from 22%. The NDP commitment to gender equality has led to policies that have resulted in more female candidates, and thus more women in our government. During the last provincial election I learned that the NDP will only run a male candidate if there are no women willing to take on the riding. Yet even with this policy, it is clear that the NDP has only managed 40%.
Personally, I wouldn’t vote for any candidate based on gender. You can have good or bad candidates. My goal in voting in any election is to vote for the person I believe will do the best job, so I would certainly never vote for a woman who did not inspire my confidence.
But still, it is a problem. If women aren’t represented in our democratic government, the laws made by that government are unlikely to be in our best interests. That is a problem.
This isn’t only a Canadian concern.
On Thursday I’m attending the screening of a documentary hosted by the Fairvote Canada Waterloo Chapter:
Menocracy
What: Documentary (see the trailer at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoLWSzq2v74 )
When: Thursday January 26, 7 PM
Where: Lyle S. Hallman School of Social Work Auditorium Room 301
(located behind Kitchener City Hall, across the street in the Laurier building)
Looking at the Senate for the Oh! Canada blog, I was struck by the much higher percentage of women serving on the Senate than in the House of Commons. Where we’re barely managing a quarter of our representatives in the House of Commons are women, the Senate boasts more like a third. This is a problem.
Perhaps the film will shed some light on the disproportionate lack of women representing us in Parliament.
Image Credits
Marlo Thomas photographed by Alan Light and shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) License
STOP SOPA … STOP PIPA … STOP CENSORSHIP … STRIKE
Today we strike against censorship
Join the largest online protest in history:
Americans: tell Congress to stop this bill now!
Canadians (and everyone in the rest of the world): Petition The US State Department.
Join The Strike!
Read SOPA on OpenCongress
Read PIPA on OpenCongress
The three most definitive articles on SOPA and PIPA:
my posts on SOPA and Canada:
Netizens Day
netizens
— citizens of the Internet —
It’s long past the time when the natural rights of netizens were claimed.
Wednesday January 18th marks an Internet wide protest made by netizens who have vowed to make our sites go dark for some or all of the day.
Here are 10 reasons you should take action against SOPA
There are a ton of websites going dark include, but are not limited to Identi.ca, Wikipedia osnews, Tor, Tumblr., Cheezburger, Reddit … and many of us ordinary people are doing it too (or trying).
Even though I am a Canadian. these laws will impact badly on Canada and Canadians, so I plan on joining in the protest, as are many people all over the world.
How to do this:
How to: ‘Go dark’ on Jan 18 to fight SOPA/PIPA has info on making your WordPress or Facebook page go dark
If you host your own website and have access to your index.html file, you can replace it temporarily with the code found here:
https://github.com/zachstronaut/stop-sopa/blob/master/index.html
I do realize that the ability to participate is predicated on being able to handle the technical stuff. Not everyone can do it… I have been playing around with it and been unable to make the index thingie work on Russwurm.org … so maybe I won’t be able to get it done. I never did manage to make the banner work on my Tumblr page either.
We’ll see. If I can’t manage it, I will think of something.
Because it is time. We can’t let this one go.
Whatever happens, forever more, January 18th will from henceforth be NETIZENS DAY.
Stand up for Netizen Rights!
Here’s a terrific SOPA Protest song: The Day the LOLcats died:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p-TV4jaCMk
Thanks to 1111aether for coining the phrase NETIZENS DAY.
from me to you
Okay, I admit it: I wimped out and loaded my old Windows XP inside my virtual machine so I could use Photoshop to make this virtual card.
I don’t make New Years Resolutions, although I do think about the things I would like to do better. One of the annoying things about getting older, is that it takes me longer to learn new technical things. But I’m stubborn, so one thing I expect to get better at doing this year is using GIMP instead of Photoshop. Because I really don’t want to be using proprietary software.
I did not accomplish everything I intended to in 2011, but I have learned a lot. When I have mastered all I need, I will finally publish “Inconstant Moon” properly. I’ll keep you posted.
In the meantime: Happy New Year!
Priorities
I’ve been having a terrible time getting my debut novel to market. I’m way behind the schedule I set for myself. It’s a good book, and I’m very proud of it. So what’s the problem?
Well, there is a lot to self publishing. Just learning the technical stuff – crafting an ebook format that makes me happy is a bit more difficult than I expected. Especially when there are other calls on my attention. I think that I blogged more in November (NaNoWriMo) than any other time during the year because so many important political issues are coming to a head right now.
Then there are real life issues… like getting prepared for the festive season that is almost upon us. I haven’t even got my annual Christmas card ready, which results in a twinge every time I open a card I’ve received. I’m a dinosaur, I like mailing cards. It’s a nice way to stay in touch with family. The worst of it has been the politics. I’m not a politician, I’m a writer. A fiction writer. But a lot of stuff is happening that I just have to blog about. In the past, the world of politics has traditionally slowed down in the weeks leading up to Christmas.
But the reverse seems true this year.
In the US: SOPA/PIPA threaten the Internet in Canada and around the world while the American Bill of Rights is taking an even greater hit with the passage of the NDAA yesterday.
In Canada: Our government seems in a rush to follow the American footsteps in becoming a police state with the prosecution of Byron Sonne and Julian Ichim
Canada is also fast tracking legislation that will assault Canadian civil rights with the Omnibus Crime Bill
A surge of public opinion regarding incursions against the Canadian right to privacy resulted in the removal of Lawful Access portion of Bill C-10, the Omnibus Crime Bill. However, the government is forging ahead and plans to push the pared down Omnibus Crime Bill through in spite of very real concerns raised on a variety of fronts. Serious issues raised by all stakeholders (the only exception being the corporate special interest group behind the draft legislation) have been similarly dismissed by the Government in respect of Bill C-11 “The Copyright Modernization Act”
Yet the Canadian Government has stated its firm intention to pass both of these highly controversial and unpopular laws by Christmas.
Are they doing this because they hope those of us who believe passage of these laws will be a tragedy for Canada will stop being concerned because we will be too caught up with our Christmas preparations, you know, peace on earth and goodwill toward men?
My child will be coming home from university this Christmas, so I want it to be special. That’s important.
But what is even more important is that the world he inherits should be at least as free and respectful of his Charter rights as it was when he was born.
Peace on earth is a good goal – maybe it’s time to bring our soldiers home from an unjust foreign war.
Good will toward men is another. I raised my child to be a good citizen, to live with honour, to think for himself, to share what he has with friends, to help those less fortunate than himself, to safeguard the environment, and to respect the law. When he was small, our family mantra was “people are not for hurting.” Now that he is an adult, it still is.
So. For 2009, my house will be messier than usual, my cards will be late, and my book delayed, all because I don’t want to see our government legislate away our privacy, our ability to share our culture freely if we choose, or our liberty without very good reason. My grandparents escaped from Soviet Russia so they wouldn’t have to raise their family in the shadow of the Gulag. I don’t want to see my child, or any other Canadians, deprived of liberty by incarceration except as a last resort. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and it’s a lot cheaper, too.
My Christmas wish for Canada is to see some real “Good will toward men” … and women … and children.
Further reading should include Stephen Bradley Scott’s important three part Lawful Access series. Although removed from the Omnibus Bill, our Government remains committed to this legislation.
Copyright and Sharing Music
Shared from an email I’ve just written:
The radio used to be how I discovered new music. Probably twenty years ago I stopped listening to the radio altogether because there would be maybe one song I liked an hour. So I just started listening to tapes then CDs all the time. I wore out the cassette of my favorite Huey Lewis CD “Fore” and my favorite Paul Simon “Negotiations and Love Songs,” and since replaced them on CD. Because I haven’t a device to play vinyl records, I’ve been sporadically replacing my vinyl with used or remaindered CDs. Very rarely I’ll pay full price a second time, as I did to replace my favorite Don McLean 8 track tape I had as an 8 track when I was a teen.
I like CDs because I like being able to hold the physical media. I don’t trust the cloud, because I don’t have control of it. As the recent Rhapsody experience shows, things we have purchased can disappear at the distributor’s whim at any time. So services that give the customer digitally locked music aren’t anything I will buy into. I prefer to buy CDs, but it was much more economical to download all of Allison’ Crowe’s music at once.
Jamendo calls itself the n°1 platform for free legal music downloads, and I quite agree. It has become my favorite music site, and I wander around there and download music so I can hear it. There are some songs that become instant favorites, but very often my most favorite songs are the ones that grow on me through repeated listening. Back when music came on packaged on vinyl, the radio hit would lure me into buying an album, but often the B side would turn out to have the music that I grew to love the most. So I tend to listen to music a lot before I decide about it.
The first recordings that I fell madly for on Jamendo are from a group called Aló Django. These guys are fabulous. This is the group I was telling you about, where the percussion is created by the sound of the female vocalist’s dancing feet. I love this album and very much hope they do more. I tried going to their website to be able to buy a copy of their album, but I couldn’t figure out how. When you download from Jamendo you get the option of paying the artist or not; but if you’re like me and you decide if you like it, you can always go back to the page and donate via a button. One of the best things was that you don’t have to use PayPal, but can choose something called Ogone instead.
I’ve read that an estimated 25% of the music on Jamendo is Creative Commons Attribution only, which means you can use it in any way you like. The other 75% has the range of licenses up to the most restrictive, where you are only licensed to download it for personal use. I’m at the point where I won’t waste my time even listening to music that I would not be allowed to use to score a home movie, so i mostly only download music licensed CC-by or CC by-sa
Josh Woodward‘s site has a lot of content. He’s been engaging with fans and working to develop his music in the public eye for quite a time. You can read his blog, study his lyrics or download his music.
There is a page to download everything free or stream if you like. One of the most awesome things is that he also provides all the music in instrumental versions; I listened to these when writing because the lyrics don’t get in the way of finding my own words.
If you decide you like the music enough to want to support the possibility of more, you can buy it from itunes, or buy CDs. I think his CD sales idea is brilliant… “name your own price”
My favorite Josh Woodward song right now is Let It In, possibly because of the combination of the vintage pop sound with dark lyrics. I have no doubt that this song will seep into one of my novels
Josh Woodward’s Sunny Side of the Street album is fun because of the juxtaposition of cheery music and twisted lyrics (f’rinstance, one about a stalker, “Chainsaw” Etc.
And another favorite of mine is the very sweet love song The Handyman’s Lament. I find I can put on all his music and just let it play, and it doesn’t get boring.
I have been listening to Allison Crowe a lot since being introduced to her music while I was writing Inconstant Moon, and I just don’t get tired of her. You can find all of her CC music on Jamendo, but when she covers something like Aretha’s I never loved a man (the way I love you) or Annie’s Why she can’t CC it because of copyright law. (Annie Lennox has long been one of my favorite singer/songwriters, but I have to say I prefer Allie’s cover of Why.)
You can buy Allison Crowe’s music as CDs or as downloads in any format you like on her site, but there is also a page of covers she’s done, some just taped in her living room etc., but as far as I can tell you can only listen to these specials as streaming music.
Because Allison Crowe releases her own material CC people can use it to score home movies and not-for-profit videos, and fan compilations, which is fabulous. A song I hope to get permission to use for my Inconstant Moon book trailer is Skeletons and Spirits. I think it would suit my visuals very well, particularly because of the song’s playfully spooky undertone, tinged with the “battle of the sexes” vibe to the piece. Fingers crossed.
For me, CC downloads give me the chance to listen to music like I used to do on the radio, knowing if I want to use something to score a home movie I don’t have to worry about getting in trouble for copyright infringement. And when I find myself listening to it all the time then I can buy some.
Just going to Allison Crowe’s site just now to get you the links, I noticed that she has a new album out, I’ve been so busy with my noveling that I had no idea. Well, that’ll be a good place to spend some birthday money
— exerpted from an email
I just thought this was worth sharing.
I don’t much like copyright law, but at the same time I don’t believe in breaking laws. I think bad laws should be stopped before they are passed, or changed if they are passed anyway.
My thought is that we need to stop supporting “cultural industries” that stifle cultural expression and penalize personal sharing. I can’t stop liking the music I grew up listening to; Huey, Annie, Paul, Don… but I am less likely to stumble across their new material unless they stop releasing music under unalloyed restrictive copyright. Sharing is better.
Still, my attitude toward the copyright laws we have has been one of live and let live. If the big and powerful culture industries choose not to change their ways, refusing to treat creators and fans substantially better to reflect the decreased costs (and increased profits) brought about by digital evolution and the Internet, that’s their business. But I don’t have to support them. I don’t have to buy their albums. Certainly not new. Maybe in the remainder bins…
Creators now have ways and means of going it alone.
The music industry has long been the worst of the “culture industries” as the distribution companies known as record labels coerced creators to hand over their copyright as the price of getting access to a wide audience.
Today’s music industry is doing amazingly well, as more artists are recording and distributing their own work independently. It’s funny, when you listen to Indie music you can tell it apart. It doesn’t all sound the same like what they play on the radio. Of course the “Music Industry” ~ in Canada the mainstream music CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) recently changed it’s name to Music Canada ~ is less than thrilled with the Indie incursions.
A few years ago This Magazine published the statistic that 30% of the Canadian recording industry had gone independent. Before technical advances in equipment allowed the cost of digital production to drop through the floor and the advent of the Internet, CRIA controlled 99% of the recording Industry. So it is no wonder that they are not pleased. It is much easier to prosper with absolute control of the market.
With today’s technology, creators no longer have to give away their copyright to a corporation that may or may not make them into a star, but will deliver them into indentured servitude.
Instead of changing the way they do business, CRIA, or Music Canada, as they now want to be called, is pushing for Bill C-11, because this law will counteract the technological advances that have ushered in a cultural golden age.
What Music Canada calls “piracy” — personal sharing — actually helps sell their music. Do you buy music by artists you’ve never heard? Me either.
So it doesn’t seem reasonable that they would really want to stop personal sharing. But they do. Because “piracy” makes a good excuse to pass legislation like C-11. The “cultural industries” want to stop independent creators, because Indie creators pose the real threat to the old way of doing business. Apparently it is easier to lobby for laws that will protect your business than to adapt your way of business to work with new technology.
The reason I oppose the passage of Bill C-11 is that I have no doubt it will lead to suppression of Independent digital content and its distribution. (See this week’s Jesse Brown Audio Podcast #116: MegaMutiny) And that will be bad for me as an independent Canadian creator, but even worse for Canadian culture.
In the meantime, I’ve been taking tons of photos of holiday decorations for years…. I’m sure there is a Christmas video in there somewhere… just as I’m sure a track from Allie’s “Tidings” would make a good score
note: I’ve made a few copyedit tweaks for grammar, not content
Yesterday was Christopher Plummer’s birthday, and I found myself writing this Christopher Plummer and Copyright a Tumblr. post.
Napster on Bill C-11
The rest of the world calls it DRM (Digital Rights Management)
The Canadian government is partial to the term TPM (Technical Protection Measures).
Michael Geist has popularized and may even have coined the phrase digital locks to put a face on the concept, so that ordinary Canadian consumers without law degrees might better understand the copyright law — Bill C-11 — that will change the world on us.
No matter what you call them, these third party locks (what Russell McOrmond calls them) are bad enough for consumers all on their own. The most serious problem with Bill C-11 is that circumventing these things, no matter what you call them, will become illegal.
Even if circumventing them ~ breaking the lock ~ is to do something that is perfectly legal. Like watching the DVD you bought. Or listening to the music file you downloaded. Which is why Napster is shutting down Canadian operations — because of Bill C-11.
These downloads are DRM-encoded WMA files and can be backed up by burning them to audio CDs. Doing this will allow you access to your music on any CD player and generally have a maintenance free permanent copy. If you do not back up your purchased Napster music downloads by burning them to CD and you later change or reinstall your computer’s operating system, have a system failure or experience DRM corruption, then the downloads will stop playing and you will permanently lose access to them.
— Napster Canada Shutting Down – New Memberships and Subscriber Renewals Discontinued
In Canada, it is not illegal to circumvent a padlock. If I put a padlock on my shed, and it rusts out, it is perfectly legal to take bolt cutters and cut the lock off.
Because the defective padlock is preventing my legal right to access my own stuff.
It is not legal for me to do the same to my neighbor’s padlock. If I were to lop off his padlock to gain access to the contents of his shed, there are hosts of criminal charges that can be brought against me.
Bill C-11 will make it illegal for Canadians to access our own stuff.
How about some Copyfraud Modernization?
Creative work that is not “protected” by copyright is in the public domain. That means that anyone can copy it without fear of legal repercussion. Although terms for copyright are discussed at length in Canada’s Copyright Act” the public domain is not even mentioned.
Originally copyright applied only to the printed word, but it has been expanded to “protect” all of our modern culture; artwork, photographs, music, film, even performance. It used to be that copyright terms were relatively short; most creative work would find itself in the public domain during the lifetime of the creator.
Nowadays, of course, in most parts of the world, ever expanding copyright terms ensure that creative work will only enter the public domain decades after the death of the creator. Some of us are concerned that the reality may be that much of our art and culture will never go into the public domain. The very existence of the public domain is important.
In the tag line for his Digital Copyright site, Russell McOrmond says:
“All Canadian Citizens are “Rights Holders”
He’s right, and it is indeed a much needed reminder, because all too often the public’s rights are overlooked when they are not spelled out in law. The public lacks lobbyists; in a democracy, the government is expected to safeguard the public good.
The Public Domain
The public domain belongs to the public. Any time copyright “protection” is expanded in some way, it is always at the expense of the rights of the public.
Which is why I get so annoyed when I stumble upon creative work in the public domain like this painting “The Empress Comes (or Poppaea Comes)” by George Lawrence Bulleid:
And find such a public domain reproduction marked with a notice like this one:
This image (or other media file) is in the public domain because its copyright has expired. However – you may not use this image for commercial purposes and you may not alter the image or remove the WikiGallery watermark.
This applies to the United States, Canada, the European Union and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 70 years.
Once any creative work is in the public domain, it can be copied, and altered by anyone for commercial purposes or otherwise.
That is the point of the public domain.
Attempts to lock up public domain creative work in this manner is called Copyfraud.
Copyfraud
Copyfraud is everywhere.
False copyright notices appear on modern reprints of Shakespeare’s plays, Beethoven’s piano scores, greeting card versions of Monet’s Water Lilies, and even the U.S. Constitution.
Archives claim blanket copyright in everything in their collections.
Vendors of microfilmed versions of historical newspapers assert copyright ownership.
These false copyright claims, which are often accompanied by threatened litigation for reproducing a work without the owner’s permission, result in users seeking licenses and paying fees to reproduce works that are free for everyone to use.”
Copyfraud exists because laws criminalizing false statements about copyright are weak.
Or nonexistent, like Canada.
Copyright Modernization
Currently the Canadian government is contemplating passage of legislation to “modernize” Canadian Copyright law.
Yet Bill C-11 does nothing to address the issue of Copyfraud, a practice which inflicts untold harm on Canadians and our culture. Copyfraud prevents Canadians from accessing public domain work we are legally entitled to access. Denying us this access stops us from engaging fully with our cultural history and prevents us from building on our own history and culture.
Archives Canada is a federally funded website that offers to serve as “your gateway to Canada’s collective memory!” It’s a wonderful government initiative to help bring our past alive.
Or so I thought until I clicked through to one of the archives brought together under its auspices, University of Saskatchewan displays copyright statement a blanket “Copyright / Use Restrictions” applied to the entire site.
This archive offers permission “for scholarly and personal research purposes only”, stating that we must first get written permission from the University of Saskatchewan Archives to reproduce, publish or publicly display all materials.
What of public domain material held by the archive?
Canadian heritage is important. Canadian copyright law should indeed have balance, and work to protect the rights of Canadian citizens. It is past time to establish penalties for copyfraud. Perhaps we should establish statutory damages to redress the infringement of the rights of Canadians.
[redacted: see note below]
All Canadians have legal rights to all work in the public domain. Setting those rights down into law would be an excellent way to modernize our Canadian copyright law.
If Canada is modernizing copyright law, it should explicitly make copyfraud illegal.
Protect the public domain.
more reading
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2006/06/copyfraud
http://torrentfreak.com/music-royalty-collectors-accused-of-copyfraud-111002/
https://creativecommons.org/tag/copyfraud
https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/15764
http://www.libology.com/blog/2008/01/30/copyfraud.html
http://blog.librarylaw.com/librarylaw/2009/02/more-attacks-on-institutional-copyfraud.html
http://www.publicdomainsherpa.com/false-copyright-claims.html
Image Credits
“The Empress Comes (or Poppaea Comes)” by George Lawrence Bulleid (Public Domain)
REDACTED
Those of you who might have read this article earlier may notice I had originally included a reproduction of a Canadian artwork held by the Saskatchewan archives that I erroneously believed to have been in the public domain. Math has always been a personal nemesis, and I lost a decade in my calculations. Therefore I have withdrawn the image as the work referenced was not actually in the public domain.
However, more than once I have come across public domain works in Canadian archives, presented as though the archive controls the copyright of the work, when it does not exist because the copyright term has ended.
When is Pepper Spray Appropriate? #OccupyCanada
The Occupy Montreal Protest continues, with a recent donation of arctic rated tents. Tolerance seems to be the city of Montreal’s policy.
Today conservative Superior Court Justice David Brown, himself a former Bay Street Lawyer, is expected to decide the fate of St. James Park’s Occupy Toronto encampment.
I understood that judges were at least expected to present the appearance of impartiality, and that a judge that was too close to a case was expected to recuse himself when such conflict arose. since the Occupy movement is a condemnation of the financial policies of Wall Street/Bay Street, it would seem a given that a jurist with a corporate Bay Street background like Justice Brown’s would recuse himself at the outset. Yet he did not.
“Every protest group all of a sudden has its own park. At the end of the day, where do I ride my bike?”
Still, the Justice elected not to evict the protesters on Friday, exhibiting an awareness of the situation on the ground. I wonder if the horrible events of US Davis in California, and the resultant surge in public opinion as a direct result, might affect his decision today. Laws and justice are supposed to reflect society’s mores after all.
hot to handle
The first time I beheld a green pepper was in a home economics in the ninth grade. I thought they were cute; but smelled bad and tasted awful. I have never understood why people like to eat hot peppers, but clearly they do.
One year I grew hot peppers which won first prize in a local fair. I dried some, and canned some as gifts. But the thing I wasn’t prepared for was that just handling them puts the oil on your hands. I learned the importance of thoroughly washing your hands after I made the mistake of picking jalapeño peppers and then rubbing my eyes. It only happened once, and it hurt. I remember the pain very well. Never again.
But it didn’t kill me.
So like most people, I had no idea that pepper spray could be lethal.
It is especially hard on people with asthma because it is an inflammatory agent, and Wikipedia tells us that it can cause “…uncontrollable coughing making it difficult to breathe or speak for between 3 to 15 minutes.”
When I was a child, I didn’t know a soul with asthma. As an adult, they are everywhere. So it seems to me that pepper spraying people is playing with fire.
In other parts of the world, citizens are allowed to carry cannisters of pepper spray on their person for self defence.
Not in Canada; here pepper spray is a prohibited weapon. Unless you’re in law enforcement, then you are allowed to spray it for “crowd control” Pepper spray was lobbed at Toronto’s G20 protesters last year.
This weekend’s inappropriate police pepper spraying of peaceful protesters at California’s UC Davis campus has triggered outrage around the world this weekend.
Pepper spray is increasingly used, not as self defence, but as a means of physically punishing peaceful protesters.
Deborah Blum’s Speakeasy Science article looks at the history, use and effects of pepper spray. It is not a pretty picture.
Pepper spray is banned for use in war by Article I.5 of the Chemical Weapons Convention which bans the use of all riot control agents in warfare whether lethal or less-than-lethal.[18] In the US, when pepper spray is used in the workplace, OSHA requires a pepper sprayMSDS be available to all employees.[citation needed]
— Wikipedia: Pepper Spray: Legality
