The wonderful CBC Radio show Search Engine has posted an interview with Minister Prentice (MP3), where he hums and haws on a number of listener submitted questions.

Then the host Jesse Brown gets to the real issue with the law: while it allows for a number of different fair dealing rights, all of those rights are taken away by the fact that breaking any “digital lock,” digital rights management, or technical protection measure is a violation of copyright, regardless of the rights of the individual involved. This includes copying DRM’d CDs to your iPod, unlocking your phone to use overseas, or playing DVDs on Linux which requires an unauthorized decryption of some discs.

As Prentice is fighting to get off the phone, he comes out with the real motivation behind his copyright legislation: the free hand of the market will decide whether producers create works DRM’d up the wazoo, or whether demand will head towards unencrypted works which facilitate our legal rights.

I don’t want to say that the government grants us these rights. Copyright, the property right granted to creators as incentive for them to continue to create, is an artificial creation of society. Information cannot be owned, and the first pirates of the printing press will show. Society is gifting this right to creators, it is not inherent in their act of creation. So to say that the government is giving us fair use rights is incorrect: these are the rights we retain for ourselves. The right to quote for democratic and academic discourse. The right to make secure copies incase our original is destroyed. The right to enter interlibrary loan agreements. And the right to enjoy our purchased product in whatever manner we choose.

Prentice and the government sees a future where whatever freedoms we have with our cultural products are only those which are given by corporations, (or the “market”, as if a free and equal one exists). This is again the error of submitting what we hold as most dear to the logic of the market–add to this health care and education, which I am sure Harper would love to get his hands on (or off).

Actually, perhaps Prentice is correct. Maybe the market will rule, and people will stop buying these goods from large companies, and go back to a time when individuals interacted directly with the artists and creators themselves. While this required one to be a travelling musician in the past, now all one needs is five thousand dollars of recording equipment and a pretty website to make money. And I don’t think those dinosaurs in business and government have understood that reality yet.

I don’t tend to comment on politics; it doesn’t really solve much, and in the current climate of debate you are either talking to an opponent who won’t see your side, or preaching to those with whom you already agree. Mostly, I am interested in political theory, from my philosophy background.

However, from Library Juice I got this report that Israeli troops targeted a Palestinian archive full of government records–passports, birth and death certificates, other identification documents–destroying the contents beyond recovery. Library Juice quotes the original article, and I am going to use the same quote because it illustrates the historical importance of the archive:

hundreds of thousands of file cases and documents — birth and death certificates, identification records, passports and other travel documents, ledgers of hand written information — a heritage of historical information about Nablus residents that covered more than 100 years of successive Palestinian occupations under the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate, the Jordanian kingdom, and the current Israeli regime.

What strikes me is that, according to the article, Palestinian officials offered the keys to the archive to the soldiers, who were reportedly “searching for ‘wanted men’ for the purpose of ‘national security.’” Okay, let’s give the Israelis the benefit of the doubt: maybe there were bad men in the archive, and maybe the army didn’t want to risk soldier’s lives, so just used bombs to be sure they got all the “wanted men.”

Then what about this:

“They destroyed the building completely, but that wasn’t enough for the Israelis. They then used their Caterpillar bulldozers to churn up everything and mix all the documents with the soil so that nothing is able to be preserved,” [director of the Ministry of the Interior in Nablus] Ateereh said.

The records of a government are what give it legitimacy (good reading is the beginning portion of Derrida’s Archive Fever). These archives, going back 100 years, document the current and previous residents of the area, including now absent Palestinian refuges. Documentation is the source of these people’s claims, without which they become homeless and voiceless. Regardless of what side one takes, such destruction is illegitimate, and harms not only the people of the area, but our entire collective memory.

Elayne Riggs noticed this article from the New York Time which begins:

Hezbollah militants in southern Lebanon have amassed thousands of surface-to-surface rockets, including missiles with the range to strike cities in northern Israel, according to senior Israeli and Western officials.

However, the very next sentence reads: “As the Bush administration moves to confront Iraq, some officials are concerned that Hezbollah could step up its attacks on Israel.” Something amiss here.

Still, officials worry that the buildup of so many rockets could tempt Hezbollah to expand its operations. Adding to this worry is the fear that Iran or Syria might encourage Hezbollah to stir up tensions along Israel’s northern frontier to divert attention from Iraq and complicate the Bush administration’s plans to topple Saddam Hussein.

Elayne notes that page 2 talks about “Secretary of State Colin Powell.” So she does what every good reader of Orwell does, she takes a screen shot (shown left). Which is a good thing, because the original has been updated:

This article originally appeared in The New York Times on Sept. 27, 2002.

Let’s consider the fact that maybe the NYT was sincere in running (recycling? plagiarizing?) an old piece from before Iraq. But what is the context? Does it inform us of anything new? It contains no new commentary, no new analysis, and no information beyond what we already know: Hezbollah has missiles (really? that’s what that noise is…).

So there is no rational reason for re-running the story. Everyone tries to submit the same work twice, but at least they could run over it once and check for glaring errors. Have things become so bad were we cannot even cheat with intelligence?

Link (from Ann Bartow)

To be honest, I find he talked a lot and didn’t say much. The topic of his speech was that we, as Canadians, shouldn’t think we are without blood on our hands, and then he went on to list about 40 minutes worth of contemporary examples of oppression, both internally and externally, domestic and abroad, that “Canada” (I didn’t understand if he was talking about Canada the society or Canada the government, or both) is actively involved in. And, that was basically the end, with no theory, no philosophy, no plan of action, except the standard Michael Moore type complaining, without any form of positive plans.

Which is not to say I didn’t agree with him. I don’t know if such simplistic labels as “Socialist” or “Anarchist”–or even “theist” or “atheist”–should be used by intelligent people, who are always free for forge their own path. Yet, however much this man is famous in activist circles, I thought he didn’t tell me anything I (or most of the group that was assembled) already knew. Governments are bad?? What a shock. The history lesson I could have got from reading Indymedia, Noam Chomsky and Wikipedia.

However, what I did find shocking was his so-called opposition to violence, which was only an opposition to the violence of the oppressor, not the oppressed. At an even whose fliers demanded an end uniquivicol to violence at the university (not just one type of violence), I found that calling US and Canadian oppressors “murderers” and those who retaliate with violence, such as the leaders of the Haitian revolution, “unequivocal”.(Jaggi called Toussaint L’Ouverture a hero).

I got up and tried to point out the slight hypocrisy in that statement. I made the point that some theorists would argue that violence, in all its forms, is the problem, and not who wields it. Despite what the Wikipedia article says about him, he is not a pacifist, and he admitted that he supported the use of violence when it is necessary in conflict against oppression.

I hope that one day we can reach a point where only thinkers and humanitarians can be thought of as heroes. It takes more bravery to be Gandhi or Dr. King that a violent military commander, regardless of what side he shed blood for–blood is blood. Later I discussed a wonderful Derrida essay with a member of the audience, “The Force of Law”, which, in short, says that all critique, all revolution, begins with a kind of Divine violence that does away with law, but that same movement of violence eventually sets up and enforces new law, defeating its original purpose.

The end of violence, Derrida writes, exists in this messianic time (not a specific messianism) that is always in the future, but it never arrives. The ideal is always betrayed.

I guess I didn’t agree with his ideas of the role of violence.

In a decision hailed by free-speech advocates, the Delaware Supreme Court on Wednesday reversed a lower court decision requiring an Internet service provider to disclose the identity of an anonymous blogger who targeted a local elected official.

Of course, when entering the public sphere, the people are legally entitled to critique. The judge of the superior court wrote that the internet is a “unique democratizing medium unlike anything that has come before,” and argued that setting the bar too low would stop people from their given right to communicate and critique anonymously. And, he also says what I have been thinking for a long time, that blogs and chatrooms serve the same function as early democratic pamphleteering.

The nature of such a zone of freedom as the internet (Siva calls it anarchistic) is that we shouldn’t resort to legal means to combat ideas which we don’t like. In an academic’s dream, what we have to do is make a better blog with better arguments than those we dislike. Ideally, in such decentralized networks, it is all about survival of the fittest, which, in this instance, is a movement of freedom. And this judge agreed:

Steele noted in his opinion that plaintiffs in such cases can use the Internet to respond to character attacks and “generally set the record straight,” and that, as in Cahill’s case, blogs and chatrooms tend to be vehicles for people to express opinions, not facts.

It is going to happen, in the not too distant future, when it won’t be the cultural norm to fight what we don’t like with legal means, if it is in the realm of ideas. Sure, we are still going to call the cops for murder and arson, but if someone we don’t like is making arguments, which are the hight of non-violence, we won’t respond with an agent of violence, i.e. the State, but with an attack of non-violence, our words.

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