From a Tyee article about proposed changes to BC’s freedom of information laws:
The government also asked the committee to rewrite the law so it can refuse access to security video from jail cells.
The reason for the request? The BC government doesn’t want to be forced to release videos like this one, from a holding cell in Victoria in 2005:
The fifteen-year-old girl in that video was tied up and tethered to the door of the holding cell for four hours. She later sued the Victoria Police Department and won. How do you think the case would have turned out if she couldn’t get access to the video?
And what does it say about the BC government that they want to cover up incidents like this?
Vancouver’s two major newspapers are sponsoring a government-run centre that will tell international media covering the 2010 Winter Olympics about how the province is dealing with homelessness issues in the city’s troubled Downtown Eastside. [...]
News that BC Housing and the City of Vancouver wanted to establish a centre to “showcase the range of programs and services that have been undertaken to address the issues of homelessness” was first reported by Public Eye in November. ”We think there’s a good story to tell about what we’ve done in B.C. for homelessness, mental health, drug addiction,” Housing and Social Development Minister Rich Coleman later explained in an interview with The Globe and Mail’s Frances Bula.
Now it comes to light that six private sector interests — including The Vancouver Sun and The Province — are sponsoring that centre, which is being set up in the Woodwards building and will also target the city’s international visitors.
In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. … [W]e have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. … [A]s part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. …
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. [my emphasis]
It would be naive to believe that Google is making this decision on purely ethical grounds, and we’ll have to wait and see to what extent they actually follow through on this. And I still have a long list of very serious objections to Google, not the least of which is that they have been collaborating with Chinese state censors for years. But I think they are doing the right thing here.
Best wishes to Google’s employees in China. Hopefully they won’t end up paying for their American bosses’ change of heart.
In Spain, every citizen will have a legal right to affordable high-speed Internet service by 2011. That makes Spain the second country in the world to declare broadband access a right; Finland was the first. Several other countries — for example, France and Estonia — have already declared Internet access (but not necessarily high-speed access) to be a human right.
Meanwhile, here on BC’s Pender Island, smack in the middle of the ferry corridor from Vancouver to Victoria, many people still don’t have access to high-speed Internet connections. According to this month’s Pender Post (not online, sorry), Shaw had planned to apply for funding from the federal government to extend its existing broadband infrastructure to cover the whole island, but they pulled out three days before the funding deadline, leaving many residents in the lurch. In fact, in many parts of BC, your Internet options are still limited to unreliable satellite connections — that is, if you can get a connection at all. You could argue that BC is a special case because of its geography, but the same problem hasn’t prevented Finland from guaranteeing its citizens’ right to accessible high-speed Internet.
Oh, and that funding that Shaw was going to apply for? That’s part of a federal initiative called Broadband Canada, which has $225 million to allocate over three years to extending high-speed Internet coverage in Canada. Which is great, as far as it goes — only it doesn’t go nearly far enough: Broadband Canada received a total of $972 million in funding requests, and as we can infer from the situation on Pender Island, even that doesn’t cover the existing demand.
Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that at least two major publishers are refusing to distribute e-books to public libraries. Macmillan and Simon & Schuster feel that e-books in libraries are incompatible with their business model. The fact that this violates the spirit (and possibly the letter) of the first sale doctrine is apparently not an issue for them. They can’t figure out how to adapt to the modern world, with its computers and internets and whatnot, so they’re doing what they can to prop up that business model against the tide of history.
If you’ve ever tried to use your library’s e-book collection, this probably won’t surprise you. Selection tends to be hit-and-miss, the user experience provided by most e-book vendors is appalling, and both problems are a direct result of content providers’ paranoia about their profit margins in the digital world. We’ve already seen that Macmillan and Simon & Schuster won’t sell e-books to libraries; other publishers don’t do the e-book thing at all because they’re afraid of piracy or too scared of change to see a market in e-books. In some cases, when you “check out” an e-book at your library, other patrons are prevented from signing out that “copy” of the book, which makes no sense at all — except, of course, as a mechanism for content providers to maximize their control and thereby, theoretically, their profits. I can’t even use large portions of my local library’s e-book collection because you have to install DRM-enforcing software on your computer (even for the public-domain e-books!), and the software in question doesn’t run on Linux. Some libraries have found ways around the usability problems, but if the publishers won’t sell you e-books under any circumstances, there’s not much that libraries can do about it.
So much for e-books. Now we learn (if a rumor on Twitter is to be trusted) that Baker & Taylor, the biggest wholesale vendor of library materials, is being forced by Hollywood to sell rental versions of DVDs to its customers, rather than the more feature-rich versions available on the retail market. In other words, a lot of content will only be available to individual consumers who shell out extra cash for their own personal copies. Aside from simply being unfair to library patrons, the studios’ actions here undermine the public library’s role as a sort of community memory, since the extra content simply won’t be available to the community as a whole.
The DVD restriction is not an earth-shaking development — we’re talking about special features on major-studio releases, after all — and it hasn’t been publicly confirmed yet, but if we combine that with the e-book problems outlined above, we see a trend on the part of “Big Content” to screw over public libraries in the digital realm in the name of profit and a failing business model. And when you add a legislative regime that’s moving towards the absurd restrictions on library use and distribution of digital content that we saw in last year’s proposed copyright law, it starts to look like maybe there is a real problem here.