If you do a Google Image Search for Prime Suspect you’ll find that the majority of the pictures are of Helen Mirren, not Maria Bello. That’s because the NBC version of Prime Suspect which premiered last week is a remake of the British version that came before.

Prime Suspect, with Helen Mirren, was a watershed police drama which ran from the early 90′s until 2006. Mirren owned the role of Jane Tennison, a female police detective in what was then a highly exclusive boy’s club. Struggling against the rampant sexism, Mirren’s character faced down her own demons in the form of alcoholism and a swath of destructive relationships.

Helen Mirren’s Prime Suspect was gritty, violent, and honest taking the characters into the seediest underbelly of London and holding nothing back. Even the camera work felt raw, often finding no qualms with getting right into the actors blemished faces.

Prime Suspect also broke another boundary. Seasons—or series, as they’re called overseas—consisted not of individual episodes and individual cases but each season was a case unto itself. Every 200+ minute season followed Tennison on a single case allowing for a significant amount of time to track down her “prime suspect” and for the case to unfold.

So, how does the NBC remark stack up?

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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.

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.

With the enormous groundswell of protest building up amongst the Canadian population, it seems as though Internet metering (or usaged-based billing) is going to wind up as a mere footnote in Canadian telecom history. At least, let’s hope that’s the case.

The concept of billing Internet customers according to how much bandwidth they use isn’t a particularly new concept. Years ago, I signed what was a early version of the current Stop the Meter petition to call on regulators to say ‘no’ to companies setting strict limits on their customers and then charging enormous fees for overages. Back then, it was the big Canadian telecoms, Rogers and Bell, who moved to reduce the amount of bandwidth their customers could use and hitting them with fines for every gigabyte they went over. The rationale then was that the Internet was growing too fast and that a select few customers were “hogging” the pipelines. These so-called heavy users were the kind of geeks who lived in their parents’ basement and downloaded full seasons of television shows, full-length movies, and pirated music. At first, they were painted as sinister delinquents who wanted to ruin the fun for everyone else. But then Rogers and Bell rolled out even more strict limits on downloading and the “regular” users began to feel the pinch as well.

With study upon study revealing that more Canadians are ditching their landlines for cellphones, and abandoning their cable and satellite subscriptions for Internet-based movie and TV streaming, strict limits on how much Canadians could actually download every month became a growing concern. Rogers and Bell argued that their limits were generous and that the average user would never come close to their cap each month, but others disagreed. Anyone who’s signed up for Netflix, downloaded TV episodes of iTunes, or even tried to use services like Rogers TV to stream World Cup matches or stream television from CBC will know that the tiny bandwidth limit imposed by the big telecoms is quickly eaten up.

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Speaking to As it Happens on CBC, Romeo Dallaire, arguably Canada’s most respected soldier says in regards to Canada’s handling of the Omar Khadr case,

[Canada] has failed beyond description.

The rest of the interesting and compelling interview can be found here (part 2 of the program).

I apologize to readers who are bored to death by two politically-minded articles in a row, I promise to provide you with the lighter stuff tomorrow.

A little over a month ago I warned you of the upcoming copyright reform proposed by our politicians. I warned you that it imposes certain restrictions on how you own things and what you can do with those things. I mentioned, too, that it wasn’t the first time that the Conservatives tried to pass this kind of reform legislation,

The last time the Tories tried to pass new copyright legislation was two years ago. Jim Prentice was the Minister in charge back then and he was widely seen as being in the pocket of American interests. In fact, the Bill he originally introduced was so backward, so heavily favoured towards huge American media conglomerates that the public outcry was simply impossible to ignore. As a result of the outcry, the Conservatives put the legislation on the back burner and, last summer, went on a whirlwind tour across the country soliciting public opinion and feedback on copyright.

That Bill died, on the table, after Parliament adjourned for the summer because it had no support, because it wasn’t the result of consultation with the public, because it was seen as merely pandering to American big media, and because the government clearly underestimated the powerful and vocal grassroots fair copyright movement in Canada.

Well it appears that this second attempt at copyright reform is also going the way of the Dodo.

After declaring war on the “radical extremists” who were opposed to the new reform bill, Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore is now refusing to comment on the legislation according to copyright watcher, author and blogger Cory Doctorow.

Is this a sign of what happens when an unpopular bill is introduced, and introduced again, largely ignoring public consultation?

Like many, I agree that this most recent reform bill included some of the aspects that came out of the public consultation but at the same time it ignored many important aspects as well. The legislation, like its predecessor, still includes significant rights-impeding digital lock provisions—the same kind of provisions which were protested in the last incarnation of the bill. But despite all that consultation, the Conservative government chose to ignore the rights and requests of the Canadian population and again include those provisions. And again the ground swell of support for fair copyright reform has grown and immediately after announcing the bill, and in the time since, media focus has largely centred around the controversial digital locks.

But, if Moore’s refusal to comment is any indication, this bill is fit for the same destiny as its fore bearer. Let’s just hope that, if this is truly the case, the next time around the government will get things right. This second time around, the media was well informed on how and what to report—they got their focus right by honing in on the digital lock provision—and, as a result, the public has been kept up to date, and kept well informed themselves. If the Conservatives tried to sneak a copyright bill through the House of Commons the first time, they failed. This second time the media and copyright watchers the world over were ready, and they spoke loud and clear. If this bill dies there will be a third attempt, no doubt, and maybe then they’ll finally get it right.