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There is a mixture of tax law, trademark law, and political strategy behind the disagreement between the Free Software Law Center (SFLC) and the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC).  Understanding what is happening only requires connecting the dots between these. First, why did the SFLC create the SFC as a separate entity? Answer: US Tax law In A New Era for Free Software Non-Profits , Eben Moglen discusses the need for software projects to set up a 501(c)3 tax exempt non-profit organizations of their own.  It also discusses how they created "several 501c3-determined 'condominium' or 'conservancy' arrangements, to allow multiple free software projects to share one tax-deductible legal identity". The SFC, as its name suggests, is one of those conservancy arrangements.  It was created as a separate entity for what should be obvious reasons, which is that a law center intended to be used by any individual, company, or free software project shouldn't also be th...

Many ongoing changes for the DevOps team this year. CRKN update The CRKN December 2017 Newsbrief provides some updates about Canadiana itself.  The short-form is that there will be a Canadiana membership meeting mid-January to vote on an offer to consolidate the operations of the organizations. I'm excited about the possibility of being a CRKN employee in the next few months.  As an organization they maintain close ties with their educational sector members, and they don't get confused with being a 'vendor' as Canadiana has been.  I look forward to not only the new employer, but the closer relationship with other people working in library technology across Canada. In the new year we'll also be meeting some new staff.  As well as the existing CRKN staff, there are two positions we will need to fill in DevOps. A Metadata Architect, as Julienne left for a job at LAC. A System Administrator, as we have more work than the 2 of us remaining can handle. IIIF Update Our cu...

If you haven't already read it, please read my earlier article where I discuss a layered model for road transportation , and I try to clarify that "technological protection measures" (TPMs) are actually a restriction on who is allowed to drive (IE: author software for), or choose drivers for, communications technology.  I strongly believe there are conversations that wouldn't even happen if we were talking about cars rather than computers . Once you have a similar understanding of the communications technology being discussed, and the most appropriate transportation technology analogy, you can begin to see just how inappropriate some of the statements made about communications technology sound. When I was a witness in front of the C-32 committee I gave a version of my "I'm holding up four things" talk I had already given in multiple settings (See: Protecting property rights in a digital world ).  The intention is to clarify that when discussing TPMs the...

Mike Richardson posted a reference to the pizza metaphor of net neutrality. (Edit: Previous ink no longer works, so try The pizza metaphor of net neutrality ) I believe this analogy is part of the problem we are dealing with. If we think of "Internet Service Providers" (ISPs) as a flat service, then what I consider to be the core problems won't ever be able to be addressed. The flat network discussions will continue to confuse more fiscal conservative or libertarian-minded politicians like Maxime Bernier  into believing that removing Net Neutrality legislation is a reduction of government control, rather than removing the legislation amplifying the harmful impacts of other government interventions. If you separate the physical layers ( OSI model  layers 1 through " 2.5 ") from the various layers built over-the-top such as TCP/IP layers, then you get an entirely different picture. Right-of-way is a government imposed limit on property rights used to put infrast...

Section 92 of Canada's copyright act indicates: Review of Act 92 Five years after the day on which this section comes into force and at the end of each subsequent period of five years, a committee of the Senate, of the House of Commons or of both Houses of Parliament is to be designated or established for the purpose of reviewing this Act. 1997, c. 24, s. 50; 2012, c. 20, s. 58. On December 13'th the following was included in a motion by Bardish Chagger Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and Minister of Small Business and Tourism: (c) the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology be the committee designated for the purposes of section 92 of the Copyright Act; and This indicates that in the new year that the INDU committee will be reviewing the Copyright Act. I was actively involved in the process last round.  I joined the process in the summer of 2001 when I heard that Canada was contemplating adding "technological protection measures" to...

I've regularly  written about the OSI model  for digital communications.  I'm increasingly concerned that policy discussions that hide these layers are leading to policy failure.  I see this in the odd rhetoric coming out of the USA on network neutrality, which is the same country that originated the policy failures around technological protection measures. When I learned about digital networks in the late 1980s this included the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model  which describes the different interoperable layers that  digital communications enables.  This is in contrast with analog networks which were purpose built and inflexible.  Each layer in a digital network is built upon other layers, starting with the physical layer that describes specific electronics all the way up to the application layer which is the layer closest to the user. When discussing communications technology people often make analogies to transportation technology, si...

CBC runs InCanada , an "online" Canadian Media Panel. I put "online" in quotations because while the panel is online, the CBC's broadcaster bias is always visible in how they ask questions. The latest survey is no exception. The survey was essentially about Alias Grace , a Canadian-American miniseries that will air on CBC on September 25, 2017, and on Netflix on November 3, 2017. The survey typically conflates Netflix with broadcasters, when Netflix is not a broadcaster . This is about as nonsensical as confusing a radio station with a record store when discussing music, and yet the legacy broadcasters continue to try to push this nonsense. I sometimes make the comparison to the difference between an outhouse and indoor plumbing: Like broadcasting, people made use of outhouses before modern conveniences like indoor plumbing came along. And like indoor plumbing, people aren't likely to want to go backwards once they get used to online streaming. While outhous...