So much for my optimistic view that our society is learning that the best way to fight copyright infringement is to make paid content readily available. The ACTA, or Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, appears to be a venue for US media-content-management industries to flex its muscle internationally. Jesse Brown's Search Engine, of which I am a fan, has a podcast on the Canadian perspective on the ACTA.

Our minority governments in Canada have treated us reasonably well. Minority leadership kept us out of Iraq and it kept Jim Prentice from creating his digital police state. We don't need tougher laws, because people want to pay a reasonable price for easy access to media.

Maybe technology moved faster than content-providers could keep up. Maybe content-providers resisted change because they wanted to keep their brick-and-mortar stores and CD/DVD production infrastructure alive. Whatever the cause, our culture needed peer-to-peer filesharing and bit-torrents to incite the content-distribution companies to change with the times and provide online content.

The transition phase was ugly, with the RIAA showing its evil nature at every turn. The quote from the Jammie Thomas (mis)trial that I found most disturbing was from the RIAA attorney: "Requiring proof of actual transfers would cripple efforts to enforce copyright owners’ rights online." It would be so much easier to lock up all kinds of criminals if we didn't have to go to all of the trouble of finding proof.

Thankfully, we are getting to the other end of this revolution and even the RIAA has backed off on the lawsuits, now that they have found ways to profit from online distribution. Because, at the end of the day, even though these corporations have shown themselves to be evil, us regular, law-abiding citizens want to do the right thing and support the media infrastructure that entertains and informs us.

Brokers of the peace in this transition are the Barenaked Ladies and the Canadian Music Creators' Coalition. Peace makers make me proud to be Canadian. The Greens from the European Parliament have a counter-propaganda ad that points out the logic fallacies in the logic in the unavoidable MPAA "I wouldn't steal" ads.

Twitter icon and hilarious British comedian Stephen Fry lampoons the "I wouldn't steal" ads in his articulate and humorous address to the iTunes Live Festival this summer. His perspective on the conflict over copyrights is both funny and thought-provoking.

With more access available for ad-supported or pay-per-use content, P2P traffic has decreased as a percentage of total internet traffic, as discussed in this Wired article, Peer-to-Peer Passé.

It looks like the war against copyright infringement will be won by simply giving people what they want, and not suing them or making them feel guilty for wanting it.

I plan to compile a collection of thought-provoking discussions on copyright. Issues around copyrights have created a heated political battleground. Content owners are in a battle with content consumers, and, ironically enough, the content creators seem to be caught in the middle. I am no expert on the subject, so we will not see any original content here, but I hope to create a small collection of interesting perspectives so that one can get up to speed 

Here is my first post: Who Owns Ideas?, which is an interesting episode from the CBC Radio program, Ideas.

This is perhaps the most balanced, detailed discussion on intellectual "property" that I have heard so far. I especially appreciate the historical context, that discusses how the original copyright laws were penned to encourage artists to add to the public domain by giving them seven years to profit from their works. We have deviated far from the original legislation in both practice and intent.