The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Who owns what online and what they can do with it is quickly coming to the forefront of our information society. In Canada, we have for years been used to hearing about our rights, but what about digital rights of ownership and privacy? Digital rights of ownership concern content. Who gets to use what has been created and is there any cost involved? Music is the perfect example. For the first several years of online, downloadable music, most people did it fairly quietly, assuming it was illegal. However, the Supreme Court of Canada judged this spring that Canadians can now legally download music from the Internet without paying. This judgment grows out of the Canadian definition of copyright. In Canada, we can legally photocopy a portion of a book for personal use. The judges in the music case looked at a CD as being an entire work and wrote in their judgment that downloading a single song was the same as photocopying a chapter from a book. The music industry is currently appealing, and how this will apply to other online content such as movies has yet to be seen. Another example of digital rights changing an industry is with print publishing. A growing number of authors in the U.S. are choosing to publish their works under a Creative Commons copyright license. These licenses allow authors to publish their works both online and in print, allowing multiple forms of distribution. An example is Lawrence Lessig's new book entitled Free Culture. A law professor at Stanford, and one of the foremost digital rights experts in the U.S., Lessig's book can be purchased at bookstores, or downloaded completely free from his website. Corey Doctorow, publisher of the popular weblog boingboing.net has also published his latest work Eastern Standard Tribes in the same way. These authors have argued that publishing their works online and allowing them to be downloaded for free will actually increase sales by increasing audience access to their ideas. Canada is currently investigating passing a similar law. The right to digital privacy is also a growing concern. Since the September 11th attacks, what we say and do online can be tracked ever more closely by our government. I'm rarely accused of being paranoid and I'm often too free with my personal information online (which has resulted in an email inbox filled daily with spam), but a few tips to the wise. First of all, having a few email addresses for different types of business online is a good idea. For example, a home email address for personal correspondence, a second for shopping online, and even a third to do wacky things online is a good idea. Keep everything separate. Second, remember that anything you post online can be tracked back to you. I've heard of a number of a cases of people being refused good professional jobs because prospective employers have searched out their online activities and found distasteful postings (even if they were done in jest) to bulletin boards and discussion threads. You have a history online. You leave breadcrumbs behind you every time you surf. The world has changed and whether you create content online or use what others have created, you need to keep in mind how the laws of our country are changing. ([email protected])
