I’ve written about copyright several times before. Now I write more.

The Harper Government, now in a substantially more powerful majority position in the House of Commons, are poised to reintroduce the copyright legislation that died on the table last May. According to Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law, the bill will be introduced in the exact same form it was left in before the election.

This is a problem.

To be fair, the most recent incarnation of the Conservative’s copyright reform has been, by far, the most balanced we’ve seen out of that government. They’ve tried before, several times, to introduce copyright reform legislation and always met with an enormous backlash of public opinion. After the latest bill was introduced Industry Minister Tony Clement made a concerted and very public effort to consult with groups that had expressed concern and hear them out. He heard them out and it seemed that he was really listening, but then the election was called, the writ dropped, and the bill met an untimely death.

The problem with the bill being reintroduced in the form it was last left in is that there were glaring—enormous(!)—issues with that bill. Through concerted consultation Mr. Clement discovered these issues. But this time around, according to the Harper Government, no consultations will be made.

In other words, they know the bill is broken, their previous consultations told them so, but they aren’t fixing a thing. Not a thing. Nothing changed or reworded or rejigged after all those consultations. Which really makes you wonder if it wasn’t all just window dressing from a government that, as a minority, really didn’t have a choice. They acted to appease; when push comes to shove, they don’t have to act anymore.

So the bill is broken. While it’s protections are, for the most part, fair and reasonable, the “digital locks” provision which has been in the legislation since the beginning is a fatal flaw.

To put it simply, despite any protections and provisions for consumers that exist in the law, if a piece of media is protected by a so-called digital lock, all consumer rights are null and void.

However, it gets much worse. In the midst of the Conservative’s last push for copyright reform cables released by Wikileaks reveal that the Harper Government actually lobbied to be put on a U.S. copyright watch list. Yes, if you can believe that. The Harper Government actually requested that we be put on an American copyright watch list—a list of prolific copyright violaters—that includes countries like China and Russia. We are on that list, at the request of the Harper Government, under the assumption that public pressure from the Americans would perhaps help pass the legislation through to law. Our government, lobbying a foreign government, to put pressure on our citizens. It seems pretty unreal.

So, there is a lot to worry about. We have a bad bill coming down the pipe. One that was introduced before, protested against strongly, and despite consultation was not amended in any form. And we have a government that, if the cables indicate anything, will do whatever it takes to push through this reform into law. For what it’s worth, both the Liberals and the New Democrats were opposed to the legislation the last time around. There’s also an enormous, well-organized protest movement that mobilized in the past and remains very active and energized. So, if nothing else, we can at least hope that the passage of this bill won’t exactly go quietly.

Yesterday morning I received a strange e-mail. It was welcoming me to Groupon. Thing is, I already have a Groupon account, I’ve had it for a while, and I was welcomed a year ago when I first got it. Why another welcome?

I thought, first of all, that it must be some kind of phishing scam but after checking the e-mail headers (you can do this in Gmail, to a limited degree, by clicking on “more details”) I realized that this e-mail had actually, really, come from Groupon.

I didn’t have a lot of time to wonder why I’d received a random welcome e-mail when I received another, this one was an actual coupon. A coupon for a gym membership in Virginia. Now I was completely puzzled.

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In 1982, the brilliantly-named Institute for the Future, an agency under America’s National Science Foundation, published a study that was written about in the New York Times. The aim of the study was to predict what the North American household might look like in the future. Like most attempts to see the future, the predictions run the gamut from hilarious to naive to, in one particular case, down-right accurate.

For the most part, the article deals with some technologies that never really made it out of the starting gate back in the 1980′s: Teletext and Videotex. From what I can understand, this technology allowed a television screen to act as a kind of web browser, retrieving different “pages” that were broadcast by cable companies. In some cases, these pages could be stored and read later, in other cases it was up to the provider to decide what to show and when. It sounds like one of many precursors to the Internet. It also sounds an awful lot like 1984.

But, it’s the predictions that we’re concerned with, not necessarily the technology.

What the Institute for the Future predicted a society using Teletext and Videotex would look like is, in the end, a lot like what our society looks like today.

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Well I was not entirely surprised that traffic to my website increased heavily once the election was called—it happens every time—I was surprised, and shocked, and then in complete disbelief when I found out just how much it had increased by. I can only assume that being quoted in the Toronto Star during the Long Form Census bruhaha last summer meant I was squarely on the radar for political watchers and that I must’ve developed a pretty serious fanbase who were out there, in hiding, waiting to see what lucid and poignant things I had to say about our politicians this time.

Unfortunately, more traffic isn’t always a good thing and here’s the e-mail I received late last night from my service provider:

To: “Webmaster” <keith@thecorch.com>
From: XXXXXXXXX <XXXXXX@1and1.com>

Dear Mr. Little,

This automatic notification is to let you know that your account for THECORCH.COM has had unusually high traffic in the last 24-hour period and your account is being put into suspension.

Our records indicate you have used 3889% of your monthly bandwidth quota.

Charges for additional bandwidth are calculated based on the rate indicated on your price package. Your account is presently owing $7,847.33USD.

You can imagine the shock.

As I never intended to become such an important and esteemed blogger, I had never bothered to increase my monthly bandwidth cap limit to accommodate any extra traffic and thus, when tens of thousands of Canadians began flooding to my site, it wasn’t set up to handle that many visitors.

Presently, I have no choice but to take a few steps back from this site. Popular as it is, I cannot afford to keep it running. According to the e-mail (and I abridged most of the technical parts) the site will be put into suspension by 11PM EST but I can’t afford to keep racking up the bills until then! I’ve been trying my provider on the phone since I woke up this morning but their business hours don’t begin until 9AM and no one is at the office yet! You can imagine I’m in a bit of a state.

Either way, it’s been a fun ride… perhaps my next online endeavor will be a blog about spending frugally and climbing back out of bankruptcy. If anybody knows a good lawyer…

As I sit down the write this article I have a whole bunch of tabs open on my shiny new installation of Firefox 4. A couple of national newspapers, a local one, the CBC, and Twitter. It’s a regular political war room and, in my opinion, without the last site on my list it would be embarrassingly incomplete.

Twitter matters this election, and for you naysayers, buckle up.

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I was fairly dumbfounded after reading the latest article on Usage-Based Billing in Maclean’s Magazine. So dumbfounded, that I’ve found myself having to weigh in, if nothing else to correct some pretty audacious myths that they’re continuing to perpetuate.

First of all, Maclean’s Magazine is owned by Rogers, one of the heavyweights in the UBB discussion. To their credit, the magazine discloses this in their article but it clearly colours their commentary pretty heavily—I can’t imagine why else they’d resort to such mythologizing.

To summarize, Maclean’s editors are towing the familiar party line that UBB is necessary to prevent the heavy Internet users (e.g., geeks, nerds, gamers, etc.) from congesting the lines for regular users. People should pay for what they use, Maclean’s says, in order for the Internet to be fair for everyone.

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TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin recently aired a great piece of the whole usage-based billing fiasco that’s sweeping across this great nation.

If you aren’t familiar with the concept of the big Internet providers forcing the smaller ones to adopt their pricing structures and to charge users based on how much Internet they consume, I wrote a piece about it here that you might like to read.

Below, though, is a great clip from The Agenda contributor Tony Keller, who compares usage-based billing (UBB) to fast food restaurants. It’s a great explanation of what UBB means for the Internet industry and for ordinary Canadians:

For those looking for more techno-political drama, The Agenda also assembled a panel debate on the issue. As a way of cliffnotes, it’s 37 minutes long, altogether pretty interesting (if you’re into this kind of stuff), and in the end the Bell representative winds up coming across as an greasy snake oil salesman.