In 2008, during the heat of the controversy surrounding the government’s impending bill to amend the Copyright Act, many struggled to find compelling and appealing ways to explain the issue to the masses. The new bill would protect digital locks from any type of circumvention, meaning Canadians would be trapped within the confines of proprietary use and would effectively lose any right to use footage or samples from existing works for any reason whatsoever.
Most were (and, to a degree, still are) completely indifferent in spite of how intrusive and wide spread its effects would really be. I decided that the best way to approach this was by hi-jacking the otherwise positive and nostalgic feelings that are shared by many for the Christmas holiday season and using them as a vehicle to demonstrate the type of despair that this issue warrants.
While that original bill did not pass, a similar bill is currently wading its way through the Parliamentary process that has most of the same dire problems. The original post with this story went down with the old “Zannen, Canada” site, so here it is again. Merry Christmas!
