The kneecapping of Canadian soft power (government budget cuts edition)

Posted on May 3, 2012 by bhaggart

This is not good news:

Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada has been invited to review its operating and program expenses. This exercise is part of a more general effort aiming to reduce the deficit, modernize the government and to find means to facilitate the interaction between the Canadian population and the government as well as to readjust the costs of the activities of the governmental programs. Further to the announcements in the 2012 budget, some changes are made in the organization including the termination of some programs. The Understanding Canada: Canadian Studies Program has been identified as one who should be terminated. Therefore, there will be no further grants issued under this program.

What is was Understanding Canada: Canadian Studies Program? To the Wayback Machine!:

Through the Understanding Canada Program, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade fosters a greater knowledge and understanding of Canada, its values and its culture among scholars and other influential groups abroad. The Program consists of a comprehensive set of grants designed to enable foreign international academics to develop and teach courses about Canada, or to undertake research in their own discipline about an aspect of Canada, leading to publication in Canadian and foreign scholarly presses.

What impact does did it have? From the same (now deleted) government webpage:

The scope of the Program varies greatly depending on the region, country or even institutions. For example, it may encompass a student exchange in one organization whereas another may prefer to organize a seminar or conference regarding aspects of Canada’s bilateral and multilateral relations and subjects such as: social and political sciences; the Canadian political system; geography; history; business studies; the economy; women studies; aboriginal issues; Canadian culture and multiculturalism; social values; the environment; law; information media; and English- and French-Canadian literature.

The program also generates an extraordinary amount of research about Canada. In addition to Canadian studies journals published by the associations, articles, theses, essays, books and studies on Canadian realities number in the hundreds each year. What’s more, these documents often prove useful to national governments in their relations with Canada.

Why should we Canadians care if foreigners study Canada? The department had an answer for that, as well:

Foreign academics who research, teach, study and publish about Canada, more commonly know as Canadianists, are independent observers making them credible interlocutors and a source of valuable advice for their governments and fellow citizens on specifics issues or priorities involving their countries’ relations with Canada. The Understanding Canada Program has a positive influence on the promotion of Canada’s interests in the world.

In addition to academics, some Canadian studies associations also include politicians, senior public servants, business people, high school teachers, administrators, publishing house representatives, professionals and journalists.

As far as financial impact goes, the department goes on to note that a study done in the summer and fall of 2009 found that the $5 million spent annually on the program “generated 33 times its value in programming in which $55 million were spent directly in Canada.”

This is a big deal, and an incredibly short-sighted move on the government’s part. One of the ways you get what you want — in international relations as in real life — is not only making your case to others, but by convincing other people to make your case for you. If someone from the American embassy argues in favour of something like, say, stronger Canadian copyright, it’s relatively easy to respond with: “Oh, they’re just promoting their own self-interest. Maybe I should do the opposite of what they’re saying.” But if you can get an arm’s length expert to say the same thing, well, they’re harder to dismiss.

An example: This afternoon in Washington, DC, the Association of Canadian Studies in the United States (ACSUS), of which I’m a member, is co-sponsoring a talk by former Bank of Canada Deputy Director Malcolm Knight on Surmounting the Financial Crisis: Canadian and American Banks Contrasted.

This, folks, is soft power in action. Global banking regulation happens to be a topic near and dear to the heart of the Canadian government and the Bank of Canada. A Canadian, Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, is chair of the Financial Stability Board, which is charged with strengthening global financial regulation. Washington is a key player in this high-stakes game. Prime Minister Stephen Harper believes that the world has a lot to learn from the stability of the Canadian financial system.

And this afternoon here in Washington, DC, you can be sure that Malcolm Knight will say some things that will be very useful to the Canadian government’s long-term objectives. And they will carry even more weight because they’re coming in a forum that’s not controlled by the Canadian government.

That’s just financial regulation. When it comes to a really sticky issue like the Alberta oil sands, Canada is going to need every single non-Canadian it can to make its case in Europe, Asia, the United States and elsewhere.

The last thing you want to do is to make it harder to develop sympathetic and knowledgable foreign experts in Canadian politics, economics and culture. Believe it or not, most people outside Canada don’t spend a lot of time thinking about Canada. And now even fewer will.

Anyway, ACSUS will be losing about $95,000 as a result of these cuts, which like the other cuts, were unannounced and undertaken without consultation outside the department(s).

I imagine this will make it harder to conduct my own research into North American governance, what with the affinity between Americans who study Canada and Canadians who study Canada’s relationship with the United States and Mexico. I also presented my first paper as a doctoral student at an ACSUS conference, so I know first hand of ACSUS’s importance in creating a forum in which Canada-US experts can make contacts and pick up new ideas.

But that’s just me. The loss of Understanding Canada for the country as a whole is more serious. It means fewer chances for Canada to talk softly and advance its interests abroad. At the very least, I hope for an explanation of why these cuts were made, and how the Conservative government plans to make up for this loss of an important source of Canadian influence.

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On the move

Posted on April 27, 2012 by bhaggart

I’m very happy to announce that in July I will be joining the Department of Political Science at Brock University as an Assistant Professor. (As my brother suggested, I’ve clarified that my actual title is not Assistant to the Professor.) It’s a pretty impressive department; I’m looking forward to having such a convivial home base to extend my research into the international political economy of copyright and North American governance and integration. On that last point, you can expect to see more North America-related posts into this blog.

The teaching also looks good: intro to international relations, and upper-year courses in global political economy and the politics of North American integration, all of them right up my alley.

Oh, and now I have a way to get back to Mexico to see what’s really going on with their copyright debate.

This is going to be fun.

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Metaphor slinging, ends and means: Yet another plea for a rational copyright debate

Posted on April 27, 2012 by bhaggart

While slogging through my Google Reader backlog this morning, I came across this interesting Ars Technica post on “metaphor slinging” in the Copyright Wars. You know: is it “infringement” or is it “theft”? Asher Hawkins reminds us that people have been throwing around loose language like “piracy” and “theft” since the dawn of copyright law. He then goes on to look at the rhetorical pros and cons of using “piracy” and “theft,” compared with the more (legally) accurate term infringement.

His conclusion? “Piracy” and “theft” have won the rhetorical battle, and we should come to terms with that: 

Since we appear to be stuck with these terms, perhaps the most pragmatic approach is to demand greater clarity in their usage—by pushing those involved in the copyright debate to either limit the terms’ application to specific scenarios that involve a level of willfulness and/or commercial motivation or provide better reasons why they should be applied to unintentional conduct. Would Orwell approve? Probably not. But an ill-defined metaphor is at least better than an undefined metaphor.

I get where Hawkins is coming from, and it may be unfair to criticize an argument for not being about something else, but I think he misses the real problem with the way that copyright is discussed today, namely that so much of it focuses on language and rhetoric, and not on what we want copyright to accomplish. At the end of the day, debates over whether something is “infringement” or “theft” are effectively debates over what copyright should do. Unfortunately, focusing on metaphors means that this debate happens in the most confusing way possible.

As it happens, I was in Ottawa last week to give a talk to the Library of Parliament on a paper I wrote last year on the usage of metaphors in competition policy. In it, I criticized the way that people use “level playing field” to turn a conversation about ends — how can be maximize competition in a particular economic sector — into one focused exclusively on means — how can we apply the rules equally to everyone. That’s not a good thing, since sometimes applying the same rules to everyone can actually lead to less competition. For example, when the Canadian government opened the aviation industry to competition in 1984, Air Canada used its status as the legacy national carrier to reduce, not increase, competition.

Whoops. 

Over the course of the Q & A that followed, I realized that I was essentially arguing for regulators and policymakers to focus directly on what they want to accomplish and what their sector looks like in reality, and to avoid “metaphor slinging” (what a great term). After all, “level playing field” is itself a metaphor that may or may not be appropriate for the problem at hand. If you know what you want and are open to how you get there, and aren’t basing your worldview on metaphors, I’d argue you have a much better chance of coming up with creative ideas that will actually get you where you want to go.

(Just in case the utilitarian nature of this argument doesn’t give it away, yes, I used to be an economist.)

The presentation was about competition policy, but I think the lesson works for copyright as well. When we talk about “piracy” or “infringement,” we’re talking about a specific action (e.g., illegally downloading a movie), not about our ultimate objectives. A conversation about “piracy” vs. “infringement” misses the point. It’s a discussion of means (“We have to stop piracy” vs. “It’s not equivalent to stealing”), not ends (say, “How do we maximize creative production and ensure that the most people have access to the most creative works?”).

Your milage may vary regarding whether you think that maximizing creative production and distribution is or should be the main goals of copyright (or, more precisely, the main goals of however we decide to regulate the market in creative works), but that’s the conversation we should be having. It would be just as contentious and politically bloody — there are no shortage of people and groups who think that copyright’s main goal is (or should be) to compensate artists or intermediaries — but it would almost certainly be more honest and straightforward. Focusing on the metaphors instead of the market misses the forest for the trees (See what I did there?).

We’d be better off if we took a step back from thinking about what a specific term means and focus more on what we want to do, and how to best get there.

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Canada, Mexico and the TPP: The IP fun continues!

Posted on April 12, 2012 by bhaggart

Canada may have just all-but-passed a copyright-reform bill that’s been over a decade in the making, but more intellectual-property changes could be coming down the pike, for it and Mexico, thanks to the ongoing Trans-Pacific Partnership trade, etc. negotiations between the United States and a slew of Asia-Pacific countries. Canada and Mexico want to join. Too bad they wouldn’t have a say in what’s actually in the agreement; they’d have to accept it in its current form.

Canadian participation in the agreement isn’t a foregone conclusion (supply management is a sticking point). But it’s still worth asking what might these talks mean for the two countries, and how does it square with the North American Free Trade Agreement? Infojustice’s Carrie Ellen Sager provides us with a nifty checklist.

* Quick update: I’m not sure Ms. Sager’s assertion that Mexican law prohibits only the manufacture of circumvention devices is correct (her claim seems to come from the International Intellectual Property Alliance’s Special 301 submission, page 215). My understanding was that circumvention devices are prohibited only when they are related to the circumvention of computer programs:

Article 112: It shall be prohibited to import, manufacture, distribute and use apparatus, or render services, whose purpose is to remove the technical protection of computer programs, transmissions by electromagnetic waves and over telecommunication networks, and programs containing electronic elements as mentioned in the foregoing Article.

There seems to be a lot in there. Anyone want to clarify?

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Lessons from Canada’s decade of copyright reform, or the limits to grassroots protest movements

Posted on April 12, 2012 by bhaggart

(Somehow I forgot to post this back when C-11 actually passed the Committee stage back on March 15. Still, better late than never…)

So Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act*, has finally passed the House of Commons committee stage: only 15 years and three months after the conclusion of the World Intellectual Property Organization Internet Treaties; and just under seven years since the government of the day took the first kick at this hot potato (if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor). In more personal terms, I was able to start and finish a PhD in the time it took the Canadian government to pass a bill. Oh, and I’m still receiving highly uninformative responses to Access to Information requests filed almost half a decade ago.

That the bill has made it through committee stage means that it is as good as passed. In a majority parliament, bills rarely undergo major amendments. (It would’ve been absolutely shocking if the joint legislative committee had accepted any of the content industries’ SOPA-plus proposed amendments. Those amendments were likely just Hail Mary passes and a way for the government to make the final bill seem moderate in comparison.)

All this makes now a particularly good time to take stock at what we’ve learned about the politics of copyright over the past five years. We can start with the fact that Canada now have a politics of copyright to talk about. While copyright has always been contentious, and while people beyond the usual suspects (your U.S. government, your music, publishing, and motion picture industries, your collection societies and so on) began paying attention to the issue around 2000-1, it wasn’t until the December 2007 Great Facebook Copyright Uprising™ that interest in copyright became a front-page issue. Before Michael Geist started his Fair Copyright For Canada Facebook page, most MPs couldn’t tell you what copyright was if their re-election depended on it. Now it’s part of the national conversation.

But aside from awareness-raising, has copyright’s higher public profile changed anything? Well, yes and no.

Most importantly, the successful Facebook-based protests in 2007 and 2008 forcefully injected user rights into the Canadian copyright debate. The forward-looking (for copyright law, anyway) YouTube mashup exception is a direct result of this pressure. Of course, digital locks – newly protected by law—can override these new rights, an example of the saying that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. At the very least, though, user rights now have a foothold in the ongoing copyright debate.

The past several years have also politicized copyright. In 2004, all the major political parties were generally supportive of ever-expanding copyright protection, be it in the name of artists or corporations. This no longer seems to be true, at least of the NDP. Most importantly, their position, which seems to be shaped significantly by the work of MP/actual musician Charlie Angus, is borne out of fundamental disagreement about what copyright law should look like, rather than opposition for the sake of opposition. I’m still not sure if this is true of the Liberals, whose history of extreme policy flexibility makes it difficult to come to any solid conclusion about where they would stand on copyright if they were to form a government.

As for the Conservatives, their legislation has been so similar to the Liberals’ on every issue but digital locks that you can’t really argue that they have anything resembling a coherent, distinctive copyright position. Rather, their digital lock position is driven entirely by politics, namely the Prime Minister’s Office’s desire to “satisfy the United States.”

And I might be missing some copyright-law nuance, but it seems to me that between the Liberal’s Bill C-60 in 2005 and the current bill, surprisingly little in the actual bills changed. The big exception, of course, has been with respect for digital locks, but even here, the 2012 bill is pretty much the same as it was in 2008. This tells us a lot about the limited effectiveness of public protest in the Canadian political system. As former Industry Minister Jim Prentice’s chief of staff told me, the Conservatives saw the 2007-8 protests as a sign that the bill needed a better communications strategy, not a fundamental rethink. They responded accordingly: no changes to the digital-lock rules, and some new user rights – rights that can be overridden by these protected digital locks.

Most importantly, they have paid no political price for this intransigence, even after the government’s 2009 consultations revealed widespread dissatisfaction with the government’s position. The original protests were only successful because of when they took place: during a minority government at a time when the Conservatives were facing a contentious Parliamentary session and an opposition Liberal party that still betrayed false signs of vitality. Dangerous times for the governing party. Since then, faced with, first, inept Liberal oppositions under Dion and Ignatieff, and now a majority government in which the governing party controls all the levers of power, the Conservatives don’t have to listen to anybody. And they haven’t.

Contrast the 2007 Facebook protests with the January anti-SOPA protests in the United States. The former were successful, as far as it went, due to a highly unusual confluence of events. The latter, in contrast, were successful because they took advantage of the openness of the U.S. system, in which power is widely distributed and there’s always an election just around the corner. I’ll be writing more about this in a paper to be delivered to the Canadian Communications Association in late May, but the two events certainly suggest some important conclusions about the limits of social media in effecting change in a highly centralized political system like Canada’s.

These are just a few preliminary thoughts; the book on this past decade’s Canadian copyright reform remains to be written. The bill mandates a review in five years, so the debate will continue. It will be very interesting to see what lessons the various copyright camps take from what has been an exceptionally illuminating chapter in Canadian political history.

* While not much in the debate’s denouement surprised me, I did half-expect that Stephen Harper would change the Bill’s title to something like The Protecting Canadians from Child-Molesting Pirates Act.

Posted in C-11, Canadian copyright, Facebook activism, SOPA, WIPO Internet treaties | 2 Comments