millsworks

Best-selling, award-winning, Canadian author Cory Doctorow has challenged Heritage Minister James Moore’s publicly expressed view that those who oppose proposed DMCA style digital locks (as part of Bill C-32 the Copyright Reform Bill) are nothing more than “radical extremists”.

Doctorow, co-editor of BoingBoing and ardent copyfighter writes:

Here’s what that means for creators: if Apple, or Microsoft, or Google, or TiVo, or any other tech company happens to sell my works with a digital lock, only they can give you permission to take the digital lock off. The person who created the work and the company that published it have no say in the matter.

So if you buy $1,000 worth of digitally locked books for your Kindle or iPad, the author and the publisher can’t give you the right to move those to another device. That means that not only are you locked into the Kindle — so is the copyright holder. Authors and publishers who decide to stop selling via a digitally locked platform have to take the risk that their readers will abandon their investment in proprietary books in order to follow them to the next device.

So that’s Minister Moore’s version of “author’s rights” — any tech company that happens to load my books on their device or in their software ends up usurping my copyrights. I may have written the book, sweated over it, poured my heart into it — but all my rights are as nothing alongside the rights that Apple, Microsoft, Sony and the other DRM tech-giants get merely by assembling some electronics in a Chinese sweatshop.

That’s the “creativity” that the new Canadian copyright law rewards: writing an ebook reader, designing a tablet, building a phone. Those “creators” get more say in the destiny of Canadian artists’ copyrights than the artists themselves.

You should read Doctorow’s complete post and then submit your own response to James Moore to let him know just how many “radical extremists” there are in this country.

Doctorow concludes his post asking Moore for both and apology and an explanation. I think we all deserve one.

My opinion? James Moore should wipe off that brown lipstick he wears to impress the U.S. media lobby and go fuck himself.

Cheers.

UPDATE: Michael Geist posted further reactions to James Moore’s douchebag comments, including Moore’s efforts to deny that he even said them despite the online presence of video footage which proves him to be not only deliberately misleading about Bill C-32 but also an outright fucking liar. What a dick.