Year: 2008

Tickets for DemoCamp 18 (which I announced yesterday in this article) are getting snapped up very quickly. The first batch of 100 General tickets — those are the free ones — are gone, and all the sponsorships have also been purchased. I’m glad to see that the community’s still into DemoCamp!

Here’s a breakdown of the tickets, which are available at DemoCamp’s EventBrite site:

Ticket Type	Cost	Number Remaining
Community Supporter These for people who’d like to “give back” and help DemoCamp by sponsoring it with a paid ticket. You’ll be helping build Toronto’s tech community for a little more than the cost of a Venti latte at Starbucks.	$5.00 + 99-cent fee	67
Community All-Star These for people who’d like to “give back” even more and help DemoCamp by sponsoring it with a slightly more expensive paid ticket. It’s still cheaper than going to the movies, and you’ll probably learn more!	$10.00 + 99-cent fee	24
General Free admission! Maybe you’re a student. Or perhaps you want to see what DemoCamp’s all about. Or perhaps you’ll save your money for drinks at the venue. It’s all good. Alas, this first set of 100 tickets got snapped up in less than 24 hours after the announcement.	Free	Sold Out
General (June 24th release) This next batch of free admission tickets — another 100 — will be made available on June 24th.	Free	100 General tickets will be made available on June 24th
Sponsor If you’re a company or a generous individual, you can really help out the Toronto tech community by purchasing a sponsorship. Compared to other conferences and gatherings, these sponsorships are dirt cheap. Unfortunately, they all got snapped up within 24 hours of the announcement.	$200.00 + $5.00 fee	Sold Out

We’re doing our level best to keep these events free. None of the DemoCamp stewards — me, Leila Boujnane, David Crow, Jay Goldman, Greg Wilson — make a cent off DemoCamp; our stewardship is a strictly volunteer effort. All the money goes towards covering the cost of the venue.

As we say on the ticket purchase site:

Keeping DemoCamp free is an important part of what makes the event so accessible and we hope to be able to do so for as long as possible. As the turnout has increased and the venues have grown, the cost of mounting the event has also increased. If you feel that DemoCamp brings you $5 or $10 worth of knowledge, fun, experience, or community, skip that Starbucks run and buy one of the Community Supporter or Community All Star tickets. Thanks!

A new block of free tickets will be made available on June 24th, but there are still a good number of $5 and $10 tickets still available as of this writing. If I were you, I’d get my ticket now.

The new Canadian copyright bill, Bill C-61, was not written for you and me. Canadians with a stake in this law, ranging from customers (I try not to use the term “consumer”) to libraries and educators to artists, record companies and other entertainment industry groups — were not consulted. Bill C-61 was written to the specifications of U.S. officials and American entertainment industry lobby groups, who pressured the U.S. government of approving the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law that has been used by the music and movie industry as an excuse to harass customers and turn litigation into a profit center.

Goodbye Backups, Hello Paying for Multiple Copies

One of the provisions of Bill C-61 is that you are allowed to make a backup copy of a legally-purchased CD or DVD or transfer it to your MP3 player or computer for personal use — if and only if there isn’t a digital “lock” that prevents such backups. If a song or movie has some kind of copy protection scheme, that allowance is gone.

The practical upshot of this is that the watching your DVD of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle is perfectly legal if you pop it into your DVD player, but illegal if you copy it over to your iPod for viewing on your next business trip. The movie studio would rather you bought another copy, which would only be authorized for play on your iPod. And that mix CD you were planning to make for the car for your roadtrip to the cottage? You’ll be breaking the law for each song that you transfer from copy-protected sources. Want a backup copy of your hi-def The Seven Samurai DVD because you love the film so much and want to keep the original in a safe place? The industry has a simple solution: buy another! Making a backup copy’s illegal, after all.

As we move to systems like iPods and PVRs, the industry is also making moves towards per-device licensing. Their ideal would be for a movie that you purchased via download on your computer be licensed only for that computer; if you want to view it on your Tivo, you’ll have to purchase a copy for your Tivo.

For the entertainment industry, this kind of law is a great deal. They don’t have to do any real work — they can slap any old lame copy-protection scheme on their wares, even ones that have been outmoded. The minute you circumvent that copy protection — which is essentially just a way of squeezing as much money from you as they can — they can use the legal system to squeeze as much money from you as they can.

Goodbye VCR Features

Another provision of Bill C-61 allows you to record television shows on your PVR. That is, if the broadcaster doesn’t disallow recording, which it can do by embedded a “broadcast flag” within the signal — a digital signal that tells your PVR that it’s not allowed to record the show, because that will cut into sales of the DVD box set of the show that they’ll eventually release. In other words, in many cases, your PVR will actually be less capable of recording shows than its clunkier, lower-fidelity predecessor, the VCR.

Here’s another way the VCR has an edge over the modern PVR: with a VCR, you can keep a permanent library of your favourite shows, which will last as long as your tapes do. No such luck with a PVR under Bill C-61: PVRs built in compliance with the bill are not allowed to keep a permanent library of your shows. They will be built with a limited amount of storage and with no backup capability, and just to be safe, all shows recorded on a PVR will be deleted if they are kept for longer than a pre-specified amount of time.

A Betrayal

Simply put, Bill C-61 is a legal stick with which the U.S. entertainment industry can use to beat more money out of us by making us pay for the same thing over and over again. It lets the Canadian government abdicate its responsibility for making laws and hands over that responsibility to American record and movie companies, who will treat it as a profit centre. It is, in the words of Canadian internet/e-commerce law expert Michael Geist, a betrayal.

It is not, in the words of Industry Minister Jim Prentice, a “balanced approach to truly benefit Canadians”.

What You Can Do

I’m borrowing this list from Michael Geist:

1. Write to your MP, the Industry Minister, the Canadian Heritage Minister, and the Prime Minister. If you send an email, be sure to print it out and drop a copy in the mail. If you are looking for a sample letter, visit Copyright for Canadians.
2. Take 30 minutes from your summer to meet directly with your MP. From late June through much of the summer, your MP will be back in your community attending local events and making themselves available to meet with constituents. Give them a call and ask for a meeting. Every MP in the country should return to Ottawa in the fall having heard from their constituents on this issue.
3. If you are not a member of the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group, join. If you are, consider joining or starting a local chapter and be sure to educate your friends and colleagues about the issue.

Recommended Reading

• Michael Geist: The Canadian DMCA: A Betrayal
• Boing Boing: Canadians: write to your MPs about Canada’s disastrous new copyright bill
• The Register: Canada moots tough sanctions for DRM flouters
• Ars Technica: “Canadian DMCA” brings “balanced” copyright to Canada
• TechDirt: It’s Baaaaaack. Canadian DMCA On The Way
• Digital Copyright Canada
• The National Post’s “Full Comment” blog: Marni Soupcoff: Blogosphere reaction to Canada’s proposed Copyright Act

It’s Time for Another DemoCamp!

We’ve all been busy for the past few months, but DemoCamp — the show-and-tell networking event for Toronto’s high-tech and startup community — is coming back on Tuesday, July 15th and it’s going to take place in Kensington Market at the restaurant/club Supermarket!

Here are the details:

• When: Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 from 5:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
• Where: Supermarket, 268 Augusta Avenue, Toronto.
• Where do I sign up / get tickets? At democamp.eventbrite.com.
• What’s the admission? It depends. There are:
  • 200 “general” tickets that are free
  • 50 “community supporter” tickets going for $5.00 (plus a 99 cent processing fee)
  • 25 “community all-star” tickets going for $10.00 (plus a 99 cent processing fee)
  • 5 “sponsor” tickets going for $200.00 (plus a $5 processing fee)

Want to Present at DemoCamp?

DemoCamp isn’t DemoCamp without presenters! We have two kind of presentations:

1. Demos: Demonstrations of one of your projects in action. You’re not allowed to use slideware like PowerPoint or Keynote — all we want to see on the big projection screen is your project, doing what it does!
2. Ignite Presentations: A slideware presentation with a time-limit twist — you can use only 20 slides, and they automatically advance every 15 seconds. Is your presentation-fu up to the task?

If you want to present at DemoCamp, you can apply here.

If you want to see what Toronto’s tech community is up to, don’t miss DemoCamp!

I don’t think she’d look as happy if it was John McCain scrubbing…

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

…but I think McCain’s image, at best, is more along these lines:

Image courtesy of The Triumph of Bullshit.

I’m having fun with Wordle, a web app that takes text you give it and turns it into gorgeous word clouds, where the size of the word is based on its frequency. Since talking about pretty pictures is akin to dancing about architecture, let me just show you some of Wordle’s output based on some of my favourite blog entries.

Here’s the Wordle-generated word cloud for my blog entry titled Worst Date Ever, Part 5:

With a change of font, Wordle created a very nice cloud for the story about Julie and Amanda, A Craigslist Wedding:

And finally, here’s the Wordle-generated cloud for Assrockets and Opportunities, the essay behind my decision to leave a comfy job and go work at a startup:

If you’ve got some text, go give Wordle a try!

Photo courtesy of Ryland (who has the best sign generator site) and Miss Fipi Lele.

Update: Even more wrong — Hannah Montana Gummi Guitars. What were they thinking?