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Submission to the 2009 Copyright consultation

The following is my formal written submission to this process. The document was last updated on Friday, 11-Sep-2009 16:00:52 EDT

• OASIS open office XML, OpenOffice.org (OOo), StarOffice (SXW)
• Portable Document Format (PDF)
• Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML)

I made an earlier submission which was published on 2009-07-20 to get some ideas in early. A link was provided to the HTML version of my submission on this site (last checked Oct 20, 2009).

I also participated in the forums hosted by Nik Nanos (link to comment history). I do not expect this site to be archived long-term, so will attempt to keep copies of commentary stored elsewhere.

The following op-eds and postings were authored in the context of this consultation:

• Georgia Straight: Canadian law should be updated to protect us from digital locks (Published August 26'th)
• Digital Copyright Canada: What would you say with 3 minutes at a Copyright Town Hall (Published August 27, 2009)
• The Mark: When Creativity Goes Digital (Published September 3, 2009)
• Series of articles on IT World Canada's insight BLOG including
  • Is a copyright consensus, or at least compromise, possible?
  • The tail trying to wag the dog.
  • WIPO treaties
  • Strange bedfellows and the not so Special 301 report
  • New copyright bill obsolete before it is written?
  • 9-11: My written submission to the 2009 copyright consultation
  • Creators protecting our public domain
  • The next stage in the copyright revision process: getting political

For more information on ongoing copyright reform in Canada, please join the Digital Copyright Canada forum.

Please also see:

• Submission to 2001 copyright reform consultation
• Protecting property rights in a digital world
• 2003 submission to the section 92 review of the Copyright Act
• 2003 submission to on proposed amendments to the Competition Act.
• CLUE Policy Proposals

If you are looking for a reader for the PDF files, I maintain a list of PDF reading/authoring software.

The OASIS open office XML is a standard being set by the OASIS Open Office XML Format Technical Committee. The reference implementation is the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite which is Free/Libre and Open Source Software. If interested in the public policy implications of this software and FLOSS, please take a look at the slides I made for a Real World Linux 2003 presentation titled Office Suite Productivity in Government.