The grass is greener...

In an effort to make my blogging look somewhat more professional, I've decided to up and move to Wordpress. It seems to be a lot more flexible in allowing me to do things like post my CV, publications lists and so on, and to track the blog's traffic. I know you can do this on blogger (somehow), but I was never able to get that up and running easily here.

So, won't you please join me at www.blaynehaggart.com for some fascinatingly wonkish discussions about copyright, politics and whatever else I can think of.

Oh, and if anyone knows a straightforward way of redirecting people to the new site when they come across links to this one, I'd love to know. I'm trying a couple of things, but it's still a work in progress.

"Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done"

Canadians today are rightly focusing today on Jack Layton's legacy of optimism and integrity, and his inspiring, transcendent and completely heartbreaking final letter to Canadians. His letter, which I find difficult to read straight through right now, cannot be praised highly enough. Its call to justice and service, and focus on creating a better future for all Canadians, convey a forward-looking sense of what it means to be Canadian better than pretty much anything I've read in my lifetime. We could all do a lot worse than to aspire to the goals and vision of Canada toward which Layton urges us here.

We Canadians have, I think, a tendency to treat our history lightly. I hope that this letter is remembered for decades to come. Fortunately, if my Facebook feed is anything to go by, we won't be forgetting it anytime soon.

For me, what I'll remember is Layton's willingness to stake out policy positions because they were
the correct policies, even if they were unpopular. The most obvious example of this was Layton's observation that negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan were inevitable. For that, he was labelled by Conservative MPs and other right-wing critics as "Taliban Jack," essentially calling him a traitor. Everyone might be calling him "Smiling Jack Layton" today, but Google hits for "Taliban Jack" Layton outnumber those for "Smiling Jack" Layton by 2 to 1.

Of course, it turned out he was right, as the Conservative government eventually acknowledged, in actions if not in words.

I also admired how he balanced principle with pragmatism. When he was president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, I saw his presentation to the House of Commons Finance Committee, for which I worked as an analyst. I had read about how, as a Toronto City councillor, he would deal with anyone to advance his (concrete) policy goals, but I remember being particularly impressed at how down-to-earth, reasonable and doable his policy objectives were. They responded to a pressing need (in this case housing) that would make life demonstrably better for disadvantaged Canadians.

And he was willing to do what it took to get policies enacted. As Toronto Councillor Norm Kelly commented, "I think Jack’s strength was if he couldn’t win you over on an issue 100 per cent, he would settle for 75 or 50 to advance the issue, and he’d do it with a smile."

With that combination of commitment to social justice, willingness to compromise and understanding of what really matters to Canadians, I was very happy when Layton ran for the NDP leadership, and even happier when he won. From my outsider's perspective, he set the NDP on exactly the right course needed to be relevant to the needs of Canadians in the 21st century.

In his final letter to Canadians, Layton urges all Canadians to "consider that we can be a better, fairer, more equal country by working together. Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done." Layton's life was a testament to this spirit. Now that he's gone, it falls to the rest of us to continue his work, no matter the odds.

The Sky Isn't Falling? Dwayne Winseck Gives Us Some Much-Needed Perspective on Canada's Media Economy

I'm kind of awestruck by Dwayne Winseck's latest post, "The Growth of the Network Media Economy in Canada, 1984-2010." Maybe I'm reading the wrong people, but it has to be one of the most substantive blog posts I've ever come across. Read it for yourself, but basically Winseck has created a new dataset in order to estimate the size of the Canadian media economy. My work only focuses on a subset of that economy (copyright), but it's certainly true that Canadian communication policy seems to be driven more by anecdote and political argument than by what some might call "evidence." Winseck's findings themselves are pretty fascinating:

• Canada has the ninth-largest "media economy" on the planet.
• Far from decimatting the media economy, digital technologies have contributed to a boom in this sector.
• Between 2000 and 2008, all parts of the media economy grew, except music and newspapers.
• The picture looks bleakest for newspapers, but even here ad revenue and readership rose in 2010.
• Even the (slight) decline in the music sector may not be that significant (in a policy sense), as production and distribution costs have also declined.

Putting it all into perspective:

This should serve as a bit of a reality check for those all-to-ready to accept that the television, music, newspaper, or book industries are teetering on the brink of calamity at the slightest whiff of troubles on the horizon, i.e. ‘cord cutting’, increased subscriptions to Netflix, or drop in advertising revenue. For two recent examples, see here and here. Just for the sake of argument, even if Netflix gets $8 per month for each of its million subscribers in Canada, that’s $96 million dollars a year in revenue, or .6 percent of the total for all segments of the television industry. Of course, that’s nice if you can get it, but it is a mere drop in the Canadian television bucket, and hardly worth revamping the rules for, as many entrenched interests would like the CRTC to do.

Indeed. Winseck's work won't banish interest-driven policy reform from the halls of government, but policymakers now have one less excuse for getting it wrong.

Low Stakes in the Access Copyright Fight: $175 per author per year

DC Reid, over at Creators' Access Copyright, responds to John Degen's full-throated defence of Access Copyright (covered here and here), by reminding us what is at stake for creators in the whole Access Copyright-universities battle royale. In short, not very much. In numbers, a baseline payment of only $175 per author per year, or 10% of total revenue:

Writers get a small payment from the repertoire class. Last year the baseline was $175. That's all. This does not comprise meaningful income. 80% of writers got less than the previous year's baseline of $612, also a figure that does not comprise meaningful income.

In terms of policy battles, this doesn't look like the type of hill worth fighting for. If you're a writer.

Cutting Copyright's Red Tape

One other thing: John Degen’s one-sided opinion piece (is that redundant?) inadvertently highlights the absolutely vital need for Canada’s Copyright Act to be simplified so that anybody can understand it.

As Degen points out, in the absence of a blanket licence, however arbitrarily applied, universities, professors and students have to deal with the letter of the law of the Copyright Act. That isn’t easy. I’ve talked about this with a couple of university prof friends, one of whom actually studies copyright policy, and they’re both at a loss to understand fully the guidelines that have been prepared by The Powers That Be at their particular universities.

That’s a huge problem – I’d go so far as to say that it’s the biggest problem facing copyright law today. A complicated copyright law may have made sense back when it was mainly a commercial law governing the content industries – lawyers gotta earn their pay, after all. But now that copyright law so directly affects the lives of individuals, students and teachers, it should be simple enough that anyone with a dollop of common sense can understand it – and agree with it.

After all, what copyright does isn’t that complicated: It sets the terms under which someone is allowed to cover whatever it is we decide should be covered by copyright law (books, musical performances, etc.). Its guiding principle is similarly straightforward: it has to encourage both the production of creative works and their dissemination.

The problem is, after decades of horsetrading, the principles of copyright have become tied up in a mess of red tape, and every new reform is a chance for groups to throw in a few more rules and exceptions.

It it wasn't clear before this Access Copyright debacle that Canadian copyright law was in desperate a rethink and a simplification, it is now. The Conservative government is likely going to take another kick at the copyright-reform can, sooner rather than later. Wouldn’t it be great if they used the opportunity to simplify the law so that students and teachers wouldn’t have to feel like they were risking a lawsuit every time they go to the library to study?

Access Copyright: The Globe and Mail's One-Sided Story

I don’t quite know where to start with John Degen’s attack in the Globe and Mail on the decision of 26 educational institutions (and counting) to opt out of Access Copyright (which collects royalties for Canadian authors mainly from Canadian educational institutions, after taking a healthy cut for administrative purposes). It’s an opinion piece, and he’s expressing his own perspective as a writer (although he certainly doesn’t speak for all writers when he expresses his admiration for AC). But as someone who’s followed this issue for the past year, though not as in depth as some (Howard Knopf is the go-to guy for a blow-by-blow account of this unwinding debacle), I can’t say that I recognize the universities-want-to-stop-paying-writers picture that he paints.

Fair to say, I think, that the Access Copyright-universities battle royale is nowhere near as one-sided as Degen suggests.

What’s missing? A fair accounting would have mentioned that the interim tariff that AC was seeking would have sent university budgets skyrocketing. Knopf  reports that the University of British Columbia from $650,000 per year to $2 million per year. That’s a pretty good reason to reconsider using Access Copyright.

I would’ve also expected to read that Access Copyright was seeking (according to the University of Northern British Columbia) to “identify provision of links to resources and displaying resources on computer screens as ‘copies’.” Oh, and to keep the system running, UNBC says “The new tariff would also require that UNBC provides Access Copyright with unrestricted access to University secure networks, systems and records (e-mails, etc.) to conduct annual surveys of copying activities undertaken by faculty, staff, and students. This particular term is not only extremely invasive and labour intensive but UNBC also considers this unacceptable. We cannot condone this level of intrusion into our operations” (emphasis rightly added by Knopf). Again, that doesn’t make Access Copyright look too good.

(I’d also throw in my own annoyance, as a research and a writer of sorts, that Access Copyright has been allowed effectively to define what is meant by fair dealing – copying about 10% of a work, IIRC. That’s an arbitrary choice reflected nowhere in the Copyright Act.)

As for Degen’s assertion that the decision of these universities (most of Canada’s largest) to withdraw from Access Copyright “represents an unprecedented attack on academic freedom” by banning “certain uses of certain Canadian works [i.e., those covered by Access Copyright] from campus,” two points. First, the actual size of AC’s repertoire is disputed (UNBC claims it’s quite small). So how much of a loss this is remains to be seen. Second, it's not like these materials aren't already available through other licences held by universities. And we still have a fair dealing exception in the Copyright Act. I’ll leave the explanation of how that works to Michael Geist (this also links to a good FAQ on what opting out means for universities). Nothing's been banned. Throwing language like that around doesn't do your argument any favours.

The biggest problem with Degen’s opinion piece isn’t really his fault. Obviously this is a high-stakes, emotionally charged issue that highlights the upheaval that digital technologies are causing in the publishing industry. As far as I can tell, the Globe and Mail has done little-to-no reporting on an issue that has the potential to add millions of dollars to already-stretched university budgets, increase tuition and disrupt the way that many Canadian writers get paid.

But instead of providing readers with reportage that can allow them to situate Degen (and Knopf, and Geist, and me), they just throw Degen’s opinion out there. That’s a highly irresponsible act of policy bomb throwing from Canada’s supposed paper of record.

Google and the evil that lobbyists do?

I'm looking forward to reading Robert Levine's Free Ride: How the Internet Is Destroying the Culture Business and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back, although I'll probably wait until our library here at ANU orders it. At $28.95 for a digital download (only $5 less than the hardcover), no one will be able to accuse Levine or his publisher of looking for a free ride. They have, however, priced themselves out of my market (too-high prices, ironically, being one of the main causes of unauthorized downloads, according to the definitive survey on the subject).

In particular, I hope he goes into a lot of detail on Google's attempts to influence public policy, as Chris Castle's favourable review of Levine's book seems to suggest:

One of the truly significant themes in the book is how Levine has laid out in one place all the different ways that Google influences public policy around the world. This is done through his discussion of the execuprofs, groups like the EFF and Google’s massive contributions to Creative Commons, as well as a history of the YouTube case. I mean the Viacom case against Google–sorry. (Saying “the YouTube case” alone is like saying “my brother is in the Army, maybe you know him.”)

As someone whose whole dissertation essentially came down to studying what groups influence copyright policy in North America and how they do it, this really caught my eye. I'd certainly agree that Google is lobbying for their point of view, but I find it hard to get that worked up about it, especially once we put Google's actions in perspective.

First off, all interest groups lobby for their preferred policies. The most direct way to lobby for your policies in Washington is to hire lobbyists to provide Congresspeople with money and research that supports your cause. On Capitol Hill, the content industries are widely acknowledged as the reigning champs at influencing policy. They've been very successful at wielding arguments (and money) to support their position. As for Google, they're still new at this game (the company isn't even 10 years old), but learning fast. In the second quarter of 2011, Google spent US$2.06 million on lobbyists. That's a lot, but the Recording Industry of America, in the first quarter of 2011, spent pretty much the same: US$2.1 million.

Second, lobbying involves battling to frame the debate, and everybody does it. Against academics like Lawrence Lessig and lobby groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, you have well-established groups like the Motion Picture Association of America. Google's relationship with academics (imagine!) like Lessig and agitators (which I say with respect; agitators drive debates) like the EFF is dictated largely by their position as upstarts. They're trying to promote a view different from accepted Washington orthodoxy. Right now, the dominant view of copyright on Capitol Hill is very favourable to the cultural industries; the EFF/Lessig/Google Axis of Infringement faces an uphill battle. For example, the U.S. position in talks like the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership is very pro-stronger copyright and cultural industries.

So, sure, Google is flexing its economic muscles, but it's not like they're going up against underfunded ingenues. And it's certainly not like they're running the show.

When I see Google's attempts to influence the copyright debate in Washington and elsewhere, I see an upstart group attempting to break past several entrenched lobbies to promote its point of view. When I look at copyright policymaking, I see a process that continues to be dominated by cultural industries that have been "fight[ing] back" against technological change since the Clinton White House issued its National Information Infrastructure White Paper on Intellectual Property in 1995. In short, I see politics as usual.

And copyright is nothing if not political.

A few other thoughts:

1. I'll be very curious to see how Levine recommends that the culture business (by which he seems to mean the companies that publish and distribute books, music, etc., and not the creators themselves) "fight back." I think pretty much everyone would agree that what they've been doing for the past 15 or so years hasn't been very successful in terms of staving off economic contraction.
2. I also hope his book includes a discussion about how copyright (and all forms of cultural regulation) and technology favours certain types of creation over others (see, Beastie Boys, Paul's Boutique). In other words, that different types of cultural products get produced under different regimes is a fact of life.
3. In his Guardian column touting his book, Levine doesn't seem to differentiate between the cultural industries and actual creators. The cultural industries are a means to the end of helping creators publish and distribute their works, and while historically economies have scale have made them necessary for creators to get their stuff out there, the two sides often have conflicting interests. Similarly, the objective of copyright historically has been to promote the creation and dissemination of creative works, not to support a particular industrial model.
4. Does anybody know why Levine seems to have changed the title of his book from Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back? Calling someone a parasite (especially since many of these "parasites" are the culture industries' customers) is a pretty sure way to preempt a civil conversation.

In praise of evidence-based copyright policy

When I started studying copyright policymaking several years ago, what surprised me most was the the almost complete lack of empirical evidence underlying both existing copyright law and copyright-reform proposals. I'm talking about impartial economic analyses of the effects of copyright. Read pretty much any report, from the U.S. White Paper that led to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to the discussion papers that kicked off Canada's review of copyright policy back at the turn of the century and you'll find lots of talk about balancing interests and promoting growth, but very little in the way of quantification by disinterested sources of copyright's benefits and harms.

Sure, there are many thoughtful philosophical treatises evaluating the justness of copyright, and there are certainly plenty of reports filled with numbers produced by one side or another to justify a partisan position. But studies looking at the societal impacts of copyright? Not as many as there should be, and those that do exist never seem to find their way into government studies proposing copyright reform. The economist in me bristles at the fact.

Which is why it's so heartening to read today that the British government's intellectual-property reforms include a declaration that "evidence should drive future policy."

Be still my heart! For a debate that's been driven almost entirely by politics and lobbying for almost 300 years, this is a very welcome change of pace.

Glyn Moody highlights the good bits, including the following:

the Government will in future give limited weight in IP policy-making to evidence that is not sufficiently open and transparent in its approach and methodology, and we will make it clear where we are taking this view. IPO will set out guidance in Autumn 2011 on what constitutes open and transparent evidence, in line with professional practice. The Government is conscious that smaller businesses and organisations face particular challenges in assembling evidence and will assess their contributions sympathetically, with the same emphasis on transparency and openness.

Full report here. Anyway, read Glyn Moody's piece. I'll likely have more to say when the actual legislation is tabled. And it'll be interesting to compare the upcoming Canadian legislation to the principles spelled out by the Brits. But for now, three cheers for rational policymaking!

A Tale of Two Treaties

Big(ish) copyright news out of Canada and Mexico that serves as a timely reminder of the central role of trade negotiations in promoting harmonized intellectual property laws. Canadian and European trade negotiators are apparently closing in on a comprehensive economic and trade agreement, which will include intellectual-property provisions. Michael Geist reports that negotiators remained stymied on the agreement’s IP chapter, including copyright-enforcement provisions that the Europeans would like to model on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Any changes will require legislative amendments.

The lack of progress on IP is not surprising. For an IP importer like Canada, increased protection and enforcement costs represent a pretty unambiguous drain on the Canadian economy and will likely result in higher prices, as the European Union itself concluded in a study on the potential effects of a Canada-EU trade agreement:

The Canadian trade balance would not necessarily benefit from IP provisions in CETA. Trade in specific goods, that are currently freely marketed and exported from Canada, could be adversely affected. For example, several Canadian companies brand and export their products with labels that could be considered as European geographical indications. These companies could lose market shares in domestic and foreign markets if they are forced to abandon their commercially significant labels. Conversely, it is unlikely that Canadian companies would significantly benefit from an increased protection of geographical indications in the European market. In sum, both Canadian exports and imports might be slightly and negatively impacted, but only in specific sectors.

The flip side of this is that Canadian negotiators may simply decide to trade off a bad deal on IP in exchange for perceived trade gains elsewhere. Given the way copyright has become politicized since the first time the Conservatives tried introducing a copyright-reform bill, this is a somewhat risky proposition. Then again, having a majority government makes passing such an agreement much, much, much easier than it would’ve been under a minority government.

The news from Canada makes what’s happening in Mexico even more interesting. While Canada is inching toward ACTA implementation, the Mexican Senate voted on July 20 not to ratify the ACTA (document is in Spanish, but there’s always Google Translate). Reasons cited include concerns about the lack of information provided to the Senate during the negotiations (illegal under Mexican law), the lack of due process under ACTA and the cost of requiring ISPs to monitor and enforce copyright infringement in a way that’s currently illegal under Mexican law and the Constitution, as well as other issues like net neutrality, censorship and privacy concerns. They also raise the concern that ACTA could lead to restrict both freedom and Internet usage, potentially broadening the “digital divide” and restricting the introduction of beneficial new technologies that would support the development of the information society (a key Mexican development goal).

As I noted earlier, many of these findings support the view that the Mexican telecommunications industry is making its voice heard, and that concerns about economic development have trumped the previously dominant view in the Mexican Senate regarding the need to increase copyright protection.

So, for the time being, anyway, ACTA is a dead letter in Mexico. (Though it could come back.)

The different approaches of the two countries serves as yet another reminder of the effectiveness of using trade agreements to force copyright reform in partner countries (next example: the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks, whose IP aspects have been described as "ACTA the sequel", only with a WTO-like enforcement mechanism). At the same time, however, Mexico’s current debate suggests the limit of this strategy. In situations where market access doesn’t exist as an incentive and where the domestic politics do not favour reform, it is much harder for one country to reform another’s copyright laws.

In other words, the Canada-EU trade talks allow the EU to link something Canada wants (market access) to something that the EU wants (Canadian IP reform along EU- and ACTA-friendly lines). Even though such reforms are not on their own beneficial to Canada for the reasons the EU report suggests above, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll happen, the result of a trade-off needed to get an agreement done.

In Mexico, no such linkage is happening, although it is part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks, along with the United States (Canada is not). And so ACTA is rejected, the victim of the mobilization of domestic constituencies.

Which brings us to the big question. Most major countries now have relatively open access to each other’s markets, so market-access is less of a problem for most countries than it was even two decades ago. Copyright laws, meanwhile, are regularly undermined by things like technological change. In a world where the IP powers can’t offer countries improved market access, but where they still want stronger copyright protection, how likely is continued copyright harmonization? If we want to predict the future, do we look to Mexico’s rejection of ACTA, or to the Canada-EU trade talks? Maybe I'm underestimating the appetite for more trade agreements?

The difficulty of looking inward

Reactions to the horrifying bombing and shootings in Norway have demonstrated yet again how hard it is for us to acknowledge that our own societies might have their own dark side. This is nothing new: we all have the tendency to play up threats from without (Osama bin Laden) and play down threats from within (Timothy McVeigh).

Most obvious has been the kneejerk tendency to claim this was an act of Islamic terrorism. I first read about the attacks on my Facebook feed, where the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, without any evidence, wrote, “Looks like Al Qaeda.” The Atlantic’s James Fallows, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Steve Clemons also rightly take The Washington Post and writer Jennifer Rubin to task for writing the same thing in much more detail. Kristof, Rubin and the Post have yet to retract/apologize for what they wrote, although Kristof has since acknowledged on Facebook that the alleged murderer was actually a right-wing extremist.

That’s all par for the course. I think we all have a tendency to jump to conclusions. Rather, the more fascinating thing about people’s reactions is how the facts of the case – the suspect is a Norwegian (white!), Christian, right-wing extremist whose beliefs are more in line with Mark Steyn than bin Laden  – are incorporated into the widespread belief that Islamic terrorists pose an existential threat to the West.

Case 1: James Fallows, who shares an email from a “Norwegian friend whom my wife and I have known since he came to the U.S. for graduate school in the 1970s.” This friend, whose letter is run without comment, suggests that “we are seeing is a mutation of Al Quaeda / Jihadist tactics, to domestic political action and the surprise is that it happened in peaceful Norway. (Yes, there was McVeigh and Oklahoma city, but it feels different, and maybe it is different just because it happened before 9/11).”

There’s a lot in here, though the letter is interesting more for what it tells us about how the writer perceives the world than what it says about the actual event.

Start with the assertion that we’re seeing a “mutation of Al Qaeda / Jihadist tactics to domestic political action.” Can we really call the bombing of government buildings and the mass murder civilians to make a political point “Jihadist tactics”? That countless groups throughout history have used such tactics to further domestic political aims suggest that he’s just plain wrong about the novelty of such attacks, in Europe if not in Norway.

Paul Wells links us to Dan Gardner, who reminds us that non-Islamic terror groups are much more active in Europe than Al Qaeda and its sympathizers.

The overwhelming majority of the [failed, foiled or successful terrorist] attacks [in Europe in 2009] - 237 of 294 – were carried out by separatist groups, such as the Basque ETA. A further 40 terrorists schemes were pinned on leftist and/or anarchist terrorists. Rightists were responsible for four attacks. Single-issue groups were behind two attacks, while responsibility for a further 10 was not clear.

Bombing government buildings and murdering civilians to make a political point, or the desire to do so, is a commonplace among extremist groups, including domestic groups. Full stop.

Which brings us to why, for this person, this attack “feels different” from “McVeigh and [the] Oklahoma City” bombing. It can’t be the facts of the case: McVeigh bombed a building and killed a lot of people, too. He, too, was a Christian, right-wing homegrown extremist. My guess is it feels different because of our very human tendency to attribute evil acts to outsiders.

His comments put me in mind of a Canadian friend, living in Japan, whose apartment was robbed. (Luckily, he had hidden his money in a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital, which the thieves for some reason left behind.) As I remember the story, the police were sure that foreigners were to blame: they were shocked when some Japanese kids confessed to the robbery.

To non-Japanese it’s neither surprising nor a sweeping indictment of their society that some Japanese kids were to blame for the break-in. No society is free of criminals, just as no society is free of violent racists. I’ve never been there, but I would be shocked if Norway were any different. Suggesting that this alleged murderer is “an individual host for the Al Qaeda gene” is akin to claiming he had been infected by some foreign virus, contaminating the otherwise-pure body politic of Norway.

I don’t know how helpful this line of thinking is, considering that domestic political violence is nothing new (Canada has experienced its share of "homegrown" terrorist bombings, from the 1970 October Crisis in Quebec and the 1985 Air India bombings to the more recent bombings of oil pipelines in Alberta). It may be easier – and in these nationalistic times, more popular – to condemn evil foreign influences, imagined or otherwise, than to confront “homegrown” problems. But the ability to do so is a sign of national strength, not weakness.

(And I haven’t even gotten into his suggestion that this might not have happened if there had been an ultra-right-wing party there to moderate the alleged attacker’s views, since the party would moderate its views in search of votes. Exactly how does that work in a system prone to coalition governments?)

My thoughts go out to Norway, and the families of the victims of this atrocity.

The "b" is for bargain!

A small housekeeping note: I successfully defended my dissertation on May 26. It was accepted without revisions. Post-defence dinner at Town was excellent, as always. My wife, who's been in Australia since February working on her PhD, bought us a tasty bottle of Prosecco, which was enjoyed by all.

I will be posting a copy of the dissertation shortly. I might even write about the defence experience (very positive) at some point, but don't hold me to that. Thanks to everyone who supported me in my work over the past six years.

The Mexican vote against ACTA: A pretty big deal

I don’t know what the Mexican Congress’ formal call for the Mexican Executive not to sign the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement means for the future of ACTA in Mexico (Techdirt story here). However, it does seem to mark a sea change in Mexico’s treatment of copyright in general. As I discuss in my dissertation, in 2003 a nearly unanimous Congress extended the term of copyright to a world-leading life of the author plus one hundred years with only a cursory debate. Going from reflexively approving a huge strengthening in copyright law to calling for the rejection of the latest attempt to strengthen said law: that’s a pretty big change.

What’s going on? Based on my dissertation field work, two things, I think. First, the telecoms are pretty strong politically and economically in Mexico, and I’m pretty sure their goal is to minimize ACTA’s burden on their bottom line (ACTA being driven by the content industries and all). As I've noted elsewhere, even though telecoms were largely excluded from what were secret content-industry-driven negotiations, they are too powerful not to have a say when it comes time to actually implement ACTA into domestic law.

Second, and most interesting, the traditional rhetorical argument for stronger copyright in Mexico – that it’s needed to support the national culture – is running up against an equally powerful narrative: the need for economic development. Mexico’s current National Development Plan emphasizes the need for improved broadband penetration. Along those lines, COFETEL, Mexico’s telecoms regulator, the rough equivalent to the CRTC here in Canada, argued back in November that ACTA could worsen the digital divide. Its view was supported by the Senator Carlos Sotelo of the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). He said that Mexico needs a balanced copyright law that guarantees a universal right of broadband access.

As well, Senator María Beatriz Zavala Peniche of the centre-right National Action Party (PAN) emphasized that copyright law should support individuals’ rights to the dissemination of knowledge and the sharing of culture.

So what we have here are a powerful economic interest group (the telecoms) and a potent counter-narrative (economic development). Anyone interested in copyright reform should be paying very close attention to Mexico. It will be very interesting to see the extent to which this copyright-versus-development narrative takes hold, both in Mexico and abroad.

No free pony for you

There are few things I love more in life than the music of Cracker and Camper van Beethoven. During a stint as the Arts editor at my undergrad student paper, I once drove our editor-in-chief half mad by commandeering the office stereo and playing Cracker's masterpiece Kerosene Hat nonstop for an entire month. (I also managed to get Cracker named the paper's official band, over the E-i-C's strenuous objections. Democracy's wonderful when you're good at vote counting and taking your opposition by surprise. Good times.)

So I couldn't help but link to Camper's announcement for their shows this weekend in California (they're also hosting a weekend festival in Virginia June 17 and 18) weekend shows. Especially since, as I'm sure you'll agree, it fits so well with much of what I cover here in the Orangespace.

Oh, and do pick up Cracker/CVB frontman's David Lowery's solo album. It's terrific.

Free Pony Giveaway. This weekend's shows
You realize I'm joking right? No free pony giveaway. I mean we were really ready to do it. Give away a free pony to everyone that came to this weekend's shows. But apparently there are problems with doing something like that. ASPCA and ASCAP both had a problem with pony giveaways. I mean I understand that the ASPCA having a problem with the free pony giveaway. But ASCAP?
Apparently The American Society of Composers and Publishers wants us to pay a performance royalty of 2 cents for every whinny that each "free" pony emits over it's estimated lifetime of 27 years. They have that calculated at approximately 571,590 whinnies per pony over it's lifetime. This comes to $11,431.80 for each pony. Given the fact that we are expecting over 250,000 people at each show this weekend this would come to a grand total of $8,573,850,000 (perhaps a little lower as people who attend more than one show might refuse a second or third free pony).
...
Some of you may be wondering exactly how did ASCAP come to control the rights to a pony's whinny? It's a long and interesting story. Apparently most pony's whinnies are more than 8 notes long. This means they can be copyrighted and "published" as a melody. It turns out that in the early 1990s when Michael Jackson bought the rights to The Beatles catalogue he also had a team of UCLA musicologists catalogue, notate and publish every known horse whinny including the rare greenlandic horse's "Ed McMahon" whinny. As this was a work "for hire" Michael Jackson's estate now controls the rights to every public performance of a horse whinny. Michael Jackson's estate then assigned these rights to ASCAP to administer.

Although your gift horse's whinny in your own home might seem like a private performance it is not! Because the horse was gifted to you at a public concert all subsequent whinnying is considered the "fruit" of the original public performance. This has been challenged twice in the US supreme court and each time the Supreme court upheld it in an 8-1 ruling. Justice Ginsburg dissented both times. (see The Osmonds vs Sony/ATV 1996 and Mattel vs Sony/ATV 2004).
...
**final note. That nearly soundless a-a-a-a-a-ack-ack ack that your cat makes while looking at birds through a window is also controlled by the Michael Jackson estate. Our attorneys have advised us not give away free kittens either.

The copyright hammer

It might just be me, but I've noticed an increase (from about zero) in articles and reports on the way that copyright restricts people's access to information and cultural works, with sometimes negative consequences. This morning, I stumbled across a series of articles in the U.S. Chronicle of Higher Education, titled "The Copyright Rebellion." They tackle the crucial issue of how copyright law actually interferes with teachers' ability to teach and students' ability to learn by making it unaffordable for professors to place copyrighted works on their curricula, or for music students to play works by composers who have been dead for decades.

Highly recommended, and a good reminder that the purpose of copyright is to promote both creation and dissemination. While it deals with U.S. copyright law, and Canadian copyright law is somewhat different (fair use in the U.S., fair dealing in Canada, for example), the general principles do apply in both cases. Whether copyright actually does promote creation is an open issue for which the evidence isn't all that favourable, as I've noted before. But there's no question that it restricts dissemination, as these articles amply demonstrate.

Supreme Court Takes Up Scholars' Rights

Out of Fear, Colleges Lock Books and Images Away From Scholars

Pushing Back Against Legal Threats by Putting Fair Use Forward (also has a list of links to articles on copyright and fair use for academics and librarians)

What You Don't Know About Copyright, but Should (U.S. focus)

Election 2011: What did journalists bring to the table?

Interesting conversation on CBC Radio’s The Sunday Edition on the media’s coverage of the election. What got me thinking was one of the panelists' contention that the skills reporters bring to the table may not be useful to voters deciding what to do on election day.

Reporters are rewarded for reporting novel facts – scoops – not providing information. For example, as one of the panelists pointed out, journalists and citizens look at leaders’ debates in different ways. Journalists report on them like a horse race – who won, who lost – while voters weigh the performance of the leaders and what they actually said. Facts and motion versus useable information.

So what does journalism contribute to a voter's decision? If you want to know where the parties stand on an issue, you can read their platforms online. If you want a feel for the leaders, you can watch the televised leaders’ debates. If you want to know where the parties stand in the polls, well, there are quite a few websites you can hunt down, including those of the pollsters themselves. Meanwhile, journalists are reporting on the same stuff that your average web-surfer can find in under two minutes.

We already have a one big piece of evidence that the media matter less in an election than one might think. The media as a whole only started covering the NDP in depth once it started rising in the polls. In other words, Canadians massively changed their opinions about the NDP largely absent substantial media coverage of the party.

Discussions about the future of journalism take for granted that journalists play an indispensable role in engaging citizens in the political process. The CBC conversation had me wondering if that’s not a bit wrong – that we as voters get only drabs of information as an unintended byproduct of reporters’ search for the novel and (often) trivial. Balance is of the "he said, she said" variety, often lacking historical and factual context – I'm thinking of the shameful lack of pushback on Stephen Harper's patently false vilification of a possible Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition as unconstitutional in 2008. In other words, journalism as it is currently practiced in Canada may serve the democratic process not directly, but in spite of itself.

It’s at this point where most critics would call on the media to reform itself, to stop treating elections like a sporting event and start providing Canadians with more information. I’m not sure that such a change is possible. Maybe journalists are, by definition, fact chasers: pack animals, trained as generalists, hardwired to suss out novel facts no matter how trivial or irrelevant (I’m not going to bother linking to the latest media-perpetuated smear campaign against Jack Layton). If they can't change their spots (and, given that these complaints recur every time there's an election, I'm betting they can't), maybe we should stop expecting them to behave otherwise and focus on getting our information from other outlets.

Three reasons not to fear the NDP

Like everyone else, the NDP’s surge caught me by surprise. At the outset of the campaign, I was predicting a Liberal minority government, with an outside chance of a Liberal majority. My sense was that Harper had only one card to play – fear of a Coalition – and this fear card would drive Canadians toward the alternative. I didn’t suspect the alternative would be the NDP.

Of course, I have no idea who will come out on top on Monday, but on the off chance that the NDP gets a sniff at government, I thought it might be useful to come up with a list of reasons why we don't necessarily have to fear the descent of a socialist horde. An NDP government (and, again, such a thing seems far, far from certain from the Saturday morning before the election) could govern poorly, sure. Inexperience could mess things up. But it would not be an unabashed disaster for Canada; life would go on as it has lo these many years.

Right on the big issues

The three biggest issues of the past several years were the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, the financial meltdown and the resulting, shall we say, economic hardships. In all three cases, the NDP had the soundest policies, and it would be nice to see this rewarded. On Afghanistan, the NDP has consistently advocated for Canada’s withdrawal from a war we have no hope of winning (with winning redefined every day) in a land we do not understand. The Harper government’s position on the war has been infinitely malleable, as has the Liberals’. At first, withdrawal was called “cut and run” and Jack Layton’s patriotism was questioned by the Conservatives (the shameful “Taliban Jack” insult). Then, it was on the table, and now I’m not sure what the Liberals or Conservatives see the end game as being.

On the financial meltdown and the recession, the NDP historically is a strong proponent of sound financial regulation, which is what saved our bacon while other countries’ financial sectors were getting trashed. And on the recession, of all the parties, the NDP is most open to the type of government stimulus spending that is necessary when private demand is in the tank.

A history of pragmatism

His time on Toronto City Council and as leader of the NDP has revealed Jack Layton to be a pragmatist. He will work with whomever he can to get something done. In a minority-government situation, this would translate into a functional minority Parliament, which would be cause for celebration in and of itself. It also means that Layton would likely focus on moving forward achievable policies, not pie-in-the-sky revolutionary changes. Canada will not become the Union of Canadian Socialist Provinces.

A more responsible party

For me, the main reason why giving the NDP some responsibility would be a good idea is that if absolute power corrupts absolutely, so does a lack of power. When you never have any responsibility, you can say anything you want, secure in the knowledge that it doesn’t really matter. The NDP's election of Layton, a man with practical governing experience, as leader was a step toward tempering ideals with experience. Placing NDP members in positions of power and influence would help the NDP to think about what their policies mean in terms of actually governing a country, and that can only be a good thing for the country as a whole.

So: right on the issues, a pragmatist at the helm, and the potential to allow a political party to mature. There’s your case for why you shouldn’t fear an NDP government.

Michael Ignatieff's failure

I’d like to suggest an alternative explanation to the emerging consensus about why Michael Ignatieff and his Liberal party are polling so poorly among Canadians. This consensus, echoed by Irshad Manji, Jeremy Keehn and countless others, is that the Conservative attack machine has successfully tarred Ignatieff as a dilettante expat elite who’s too brilliant and accomplished and (therefore) out of touch with “ordinary Canadians.” He’s “too ambitious.” We Canadians, suffering from what Manji calls “petty parochialism,” can’t stand anyone who stands out, and so we attack them as un-Canadian and cut them down.

Here’s a better explanation that doesn't depend on warmed-over cultural and literary analysis: Michael Ignatieff, for all his achievements, is a not a very good politician.

The underlying assumption of all these cultural analyses is that anybody can be a politician, and that success in one field can translate into success into this one. Folks, it just ain’t so. You can be a brilliant economist or academic and be only an average politician. If academic and profesional smarts were enough to guarantee political success, John McCallum (former Dean of the Faculty of Arts at McGill and former Chief Economist of the Royal Bank of Canada) would be prime minister.

Being a politician is a specialized occupation that has a specific skill set: empathy, a strategic mind, and debating and speaking skills (just off the top of my head). Ignatieff does passably well at most of these, although his performance in the leaders’ debates suggests that being able to ask questions as a journalist or a professor does not necessarily translate well into a political debate.

Most of all, however, a successful politician has to understand what his or her constituents want and need, and this is where Ignatieff runs into trouble. I’m going to try to be very careful with what I say next, because it runs very close to the polemical Conservative attack on Ignatieff. Here goes:

The only way a politician can understand what his community (be it a city, riding, province or country) cares about, is to be enmeshed in the life of that community. The longer you’re immersed in your community, the easier it becomes to “read” it. Call it a type of learned intuition.

In my travels as an economist with various parliamentary committees and associations, I was always impressed by how MPs from all parties, of varying levels of ambition and capability, were always on top of the issues that they knew would be of greatest interest to their constituents. They knew how to talk about and to their constituents. We'd be at the WTO talking trade and they'd keep the conversation grounded. It’s a skill developed over years of living in their community, and years of thinking about and talking with people in the community.

I’d argue that this learned intuition is the mark of all successful politicians. With time, Michael Ignatieff has gotten better at it, good enough to be an okay retail politician. Ignatieff's tone-deafness was clear to all in 2009 when he waded into the debate over asbestos, prefacing his comments by saying, "I'm probably walking right off the cliff into some unexpected public policy bog of which I'm unaware." You don't say: the asbestos lobby, as he should have known, is strong in Quebec.

While this recent campaign has been free of these type of comments that painfully demonstrated that he was not sensitive to Canadians’ political sore spots, Ignatieff’s problem is that he’s not just applying for the job of politician; he’s applying for the job of top politician in Canada. That’s simply not a job that you can parachute into and expect to do well, no matter your bona fides in other fields. You have to be at the top of the game, which is politics and is (I repeat) a specialized field.

It’s the type of job you spend a lifetime preparing for, thinking about Canada and your vision of what it should be. Rather than consider Canada – and even Canada’s place in the world – Ignatieff’s intellectual development over the past 35-40 years has focused on other issues, like human rights and international relations.

I'm not saying that Michael Ignatieff doesn’t deserve to Prime Minister because he isn’t a real Canadian, which is what Manji thinks is the main knock against him. What I’m suggesting is that you can only be a successful politician if you’ve thought long and hard about issues of interest to your community, if you’ve dedicated yourself to listening to and working within and in your community. The higher you aim, the better your skills and learned intuition better be. And Ignatieff's skills  – his learned intuition  – are not good enough. Thomas Walkom made a similar point in 2009, comparing Ignatieff to John Turner, another guy who'd been out of the game too long.

Barack Obama’s a good example of what I’m talking about. Like Ignatieff (another smart cookie), Obama famously had very little experience in elected office before becoming president: a term as a state senator, most of a term as a U.S. senator. But as anyone who’s read his memoir, Dreams from My Father knows, Obama has spent his whole life reflecting on where he fits into U.S. society, and on the nature of that society. He worked as a community organizer. He was editor of the Harvard Law Review. These are all experiences that enmeshed Obama deeply into the political and cultural life of the United States.

Again, it’s not that Ignatieff is too ambitious and too worldly. It’s that he skipped the coursework and now wants a pass on the final exam. Even the most brilliant student can’t pull that off.

My sense, for what it’s worth, is that Canadians have picked up on Ignatieff’s lack of a politician’s understanding of Canada, which Conservatives have twisted into an accusation that Ignatieff is, somehow, not Canadian enough. As Irshad Manji notes, that’s absurd: Ignatieff is as Canadian as Stephen Harper, Jack Layton or (even!) Gilles Duceppe. But just because Ignatieff is a true Canadian doesn’t mean that he has the skills, including the learned intuition about Canada, that we should expect from someone who wants to be Prime Minister. If you don’t spend your life training for the top job in a G-8 country, why should we give it to you?

WikiLeaks cables: U.S. behind drive for Canadian copyright reform (who knew?)

I see that WikiLeaks has finally released the cables from the U.S. embassy in Ottawa. They’ll make for some fine reading as I prepare for my thesis defence (May 26 at Carleton University, Loeb Building A631 at 2 pm – bring your friends!). For now, you can catch up with some analysis from Geist (here (main one), here, here, here, here, and here) and Techdirt. Zeropaid also has a nice opinion piece on the whole release (h/t Russell McOrmond).

I’m happy to note that the cables, at first glance, seem to corroborate my dissertation’s argument as it relates to Canada (summarized here), so that’s good. Two things stand out to me.

First, one of my dissertation’s main points is that the United States usually can only get its way on reforming another country’s copyright policies if it offers something that the other country wants. True enough, but as the cables also suggest, a country can attempt to use the offer of copyright reform to try to get the United States to move on an issue of interest to it. In one cable, Canada says that U.S. movement on regulatory cooperation as part of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) was what it wanted in exchange for Canadian copyright reform.

These two points are mostly saying the same thing, but the second emphasizes that there can be a significant amount of give and take on such policy debates, even on an issue of great importance to the larger country. Whether it works or not is another issue (the U.S. here saw Canadian attempts to link copyright to an unrelated issue as a stalling tactic. That they would comment negatively on such a linkage also suggests that linkage remains the exception, not the rule, in Canada-U.S. relations).

Second, in reading these cables and others, I’m continually struck by how open the U.S. system of government is. I’d go so far as to say that the great value in the WikiLeaks cables isn’t in what they tell us about the United States, but what they tell us about our own, very secretive government. Going far afield of copyright, the Tunisian revolution was partly sparked by revelations not about what the United States was doing in Tunisia, but about what the Tunisian government was getting up to.

Copyright infringement and high prices

Just a quick note to highlight the release of a new study, Media Piracy in Developing Countries. One of its main points seems to be that copyright infringement in these countries is largely driven by the high (monopoly) prices that companies charge for their wares in countries like Mexico, where almost half the population lives below the poverty line. I've only read the introduction and the Mexican case study (which has lots of good information on the Mexican informal sector in general and Tepito in particular), but seeing as just this morning I was hoping for more copyright scholarship focused on empirical issues, I can't wait to read the rest of the report. I'll even forgive their use of the word "piracy" in their title.

For the record, its case studies are South Africa, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia and India. They also have a few chapters focused on more big-picture issues.

It also strikes me that the report, which was funded in part by Canada's International Development Research Council, is focused on the big picture:

we see little connection between these enforcement discussions [around copyright] and the larger problem of how to foster rich, accessible, legal cultural markets in developing countries—the problem that motivates much of our work.

This is exactly what we need: a greater focus on spurring cultural production, an openness to different ways of doing so, and less of a focus on copyright as an end unto itself.

The ideology of copyright

Peter Nowak is currently running a series of posts offering predictions about the future of science and techology, including weather control (!). The whole series (actually, the entire blog) is worth reading, but today he has a post about the future of copyright, an issue of some interest to me. It's titled "2021: The move to worldwide copyright," but I wonder if a better title wouldn't be "The move to worldwide licensing." I'm pretty fixated on copyright these days, not so much on licensing, so I'd be happy to hear from anyone with an opinion on the subject. Any thoughts?

Anyway, I've posted a couple of lengthy comments there, including one in response to some typically insightful remarks by Russell McOrmond.

The comments allowed me to put to paper something I've been thinking about for a while: what would it take for people, companies and governments to move beyond a fixation on copyright toward a focus on what copyright is supposed to do, namely regulate the market in creative works. Competition, I think, isn't enough:

When it comes to copyright, we’re dealing with a centuries-old policy that is rooted in two core Western beliefs: property and the individual. The major international copyright institutions (WIPO, TRIPS, and now ACTA) are devoted to promoting copyright. It’s so deeply ingrained that people talk as if it’s an end unto itself, rather than one specific tool for regulating markets in creative works. Once people in power start talking about copyright as a tool that should be judged on its effects, then change will become more likely. My biggest hope for the copyright debate is that it will one day shift from the realm of philosophy and legal theory to that of empirical economics. I’m still waiting.

At this point in time, it’s quite obvious that publishers, the other content industries and content creators who profit from the current copyright system believe as a matter of faith that copying is stealing. Hence the lobbying and the legal battles. A decade of bad press and faltering business models haven’t changed that. As far as I can tell, there seems to be very little evidence to suggest that this will change anytime soon. It has nothing with anyone being stupid. One’s ideologies change very slowly, if at all, since they’re at the core of our self-perception. It’s not surprising that companies, run by humans, leave money on the table all the time and often commit what seems like suicide rather than change with the times. I’m not going to make any predictions, but I’d suggest that taking ideology into account may complicate the story.

Read the whole post here.

Perimeter Security: SPP, Take Two

I’m in the midst of trying to finish my latest dissertation draft and get our house ready to go on the market – if anyone is interested in owning the former Ottawa residence of one of the creators of Coronation Street (for real), drop me a line – so I don’t have as much time as I’d like to comment on Friday’s Canada-U.S. declaration, “Beyond the Border: A Shared Vision for Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness.” But given that my dissertation is all about North American governance, I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least note that this agreement has the potential to radically reform North American relations.

A few preliminary notes:

1. In effect, this Declaration represents the streamlining of the ill-fated Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP). The dozens of working groups have been replaced by one (the Beyond the Border Working Group) and the laundry list of SPP projects has been pared down significantly.

Oh, and Mexico’s out entirely – how’s that for streamlining? From a regional-governance perspective, Mexico’s exclusion from this process is quite important: it suggests that “North America,” defined as Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, is at a crossroads. It could either represent a return to the pre-NAFTA world in which “North America” referred to Canada and the United States or, if Mexico and the United States reach a similar agreement, it would drive another stake into the notion that the three countries have a “trilaterial” relationship, rather than a “double-bilateral” one focused on the United States.

Either way, expect Canada to pay even less attention to Mexico than it has over the past decade.

2. Keep your eye on how the Working Group recommends that “threats” be identified and defined. My wife has been working on the issue of threat identification for the past several years (she just started a PhD on it too – can’t have too many doctors in the family), so I’m very conscious that threat identification is a political exercise. Issues, actions and people that are seen as “threats” vary over time and by country. Threat definition is not something that has ever, ever been left to policy wonks.

To see what I mean, ask yourself how the two countries might rank such possible threats as marijuana and the gun trade, and how they might differ on invasive body scanning at airports. Oh, and don’t forget about Cuba.

3. If you’re expecting this deal to finally guarantee Canada secure access to the U.S. market – and that’s what this deal is all about – I’d temper your hopes. The main threat to Canada’s access to the U.S. market is not U.S. perceptions that Canada is weak on terrorism (even though the 9/11 terrorists did not come through Canada), but that the two countries still have two separate systems of government, and that’s not going to change any time soon.

Congress still runs the show in the United States, as does Parliament in Canada. That’s all well and good, but it also means that there’s nothing stopping Congress from raising protectionist barriers to combat “foreign” threats (think softwood lumber) or raising barriers to entry (think Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative) when “domestic” interests are threatened. This Declaration does nothing to change this state of affairs.

Making predictions is a mug’s game, but I’d wager good money that the next time a 9/11-level cataclysm hits the United States, and whether or not Canadian policies actually contributed to the problem, all the people who supported a perimeter security concept as a way to guarantee Canadian access to the U.S. market (your Wendy Dobsons, your Michael Harts, your Derek Burneys) will be calling for even greater changes in order to finally – finally! – secure our access to the U.S. market.

Of course, that’s what the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement was supposed to do. And NAFTA. And the SPP. And now this Declaration. Each approach repeats the mistake of the last: refusing to take seriously how the persistence of national governments affects the attempted creation of a single economic space. All the security-economic tradeoffs in the world can’t get around the fact that Congress and Parliament continue to make laws for their respective countries. And when push comes to shove, Congress will side with their constituents.

Oh, and given that security policies can never guarantee 100% security, there is a non-zero possibility of terrorists attacking the United States via Canada, even with a security perimeter. In that case, you can bet that this Declaration would do absolutely nothing to protect Canada, and we’d be back to square zero, having traded the ability to control our own borders for the illusion of U.S. market access.

4. Given my pessimism that these changes will do little to guarantee Canadian access to the U.S. market in the long term, especially in the event of a possible Canada-linked terrorist attack, I’ll be evaluating each proposal on their own merits. Finally fixing the Windsor-Detroit border crossing would be a good thing, for instance. Sharing information with the United States on how many times I enter and exit Canada, not so much. And there’s much, much more in there.

The key point, however, is that all of these issues are inherently political, and anyone who says that they’re not is either being disingenuous or should know better. Given that perimeter security is a U.S. demand, I’d be surprised if the United States adopted Canadian policies, rather than the other way around. Then again, it’s early days, and I’ve been wrong before.

5. And hey! I managed to discuss the Declaration without once using the word “sovereignty.” My one wish for the upcoming debate over perimeter security is that our politicians and journalists treat their constituents and readers with respect and actually discuss the content of the Declaration: who will be making decisions? What will they be deciding? Like “piracy” in the copyright debate, “sovereignty” is a loaded word that actually tells us very little about what’s actually going on.