Earlier this week, Richard Owens, the past chair of the board of directors of the University of Toronto Innovations Foundation, a member of the board and former Executive Director of the Centre for Innovation and Policy at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, and an adjunct professor of copyright and technology law at the University of Toronto, published a critical analysis of last summer’s copyright consultation. In his paper, Noises Heard: Canada’s Recent Online Copyright Consultation Process: Teachings and Cautions, he concluded that the consultation “was systematically abused by a clandestine group of mod-chip distributors, foreign websites administrators and international BitTorrent users”. His focus was on the form letter wizard made available by the Canadian Coalition for Electronic Rights (CCER), a group whose very businesses depends on the ability to make illegal copies of software and to circumvent technological measures.
Posts Tagged ‘ccer’
The Owens analysis of the Canadian copyright consultations: what are the implications?
April 21st, 2010100,000 Voters Who Don’t Exist
November 10th, 2009Interesting blog by Chris Castle http://bit.ly/Rh0F5 that raises important questions about the Canadian Coalition for Electronic Rights’ (CCER) letter writing wizard and manipulation of the Copyright Consultations.
Castle describes CCER as “a mod chip makers trade association” “that allowed users to send a pre-fabricated letter to a predetermined but undisclosed list of ministers and Members of Parliament that supported a wide variety of anti-copyright—and especially anticircumvention—issues.”
He says: “The CCER letter writing wizard seems to be of very, very questionable provenance.” Castle states that “A little quick sampling of the posted letters suggests that a substantial number of them (perhaps over half) came from CCER.” (The number is much higher than that; by my estimate approx. 65%).
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