A new working paper from Harvard Business School on filesharing and copyright policy suggests that:

Copyright protection exists to encourage innovation and the creation of new works—in other words, to promote social welfare. … It’s difficult to argue that weaker copyright protection has had a negative impact on artists’ incentives to be creative.

Furthermore,

We argue that the effect of file sharing has been muted for three reasons. (1) The cannibalization of sales that is due to file sharing is more modest than many observers assume. Empirical work suggests that in music, no more than 20% of the recent decline in sales is due to sharing. (2) File sharing increases the demand for complements to protected works, raising, for instance, the demand for concerts and concert prices. The sale of more expensive complements has added to artists’ incomes. (3) In many creative industries, monetary incentives play a reduced role in motivating authors to remain creative. Data on the supply of new works are consistent with the argument that file sharing did not discourage authors and publishers. Since the advent of file sharing, the production of music, books, and movies has increased sharply.

The full working paper is available for download.

Canada, like many other countries, continues to chip away at privacy protections for online information. Two good articles here:

From Michael Geist:

As expected, the Government has taken another shot at lawful access legislation today, introducing a legislative package called the Investigative Powers for the 21st Century (IP21C) Act that would require mandated surveillance capabilities at Canadian ISPs, force SPs to disclose subscriber information such as name and address, and grant the police broad new powers to obtain transmission data and force ISPs to preserve data.

And, on the same topic by Lawrence Munn, a Canadian lawyer specialising on legislation and policy development:

Section 16 of the Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement in the 21st Century Act provides that the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the head of a police service constituted under the laws of a province may designate a limited number of persons who may request particular personal information from a telecommunications service provider. In some respects this power is similar to section 7(3)(c.1) of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), legislation which applies to private organizations in the federal sphere, which permits the disclosure of personal information collected by an organization without an individual’s consent if a “government institution” (which presumably includes police) requests that the information be disclosed. However, under section 7(3)(c.1) of PIPEDA, the government institution must identify its lawful authority to obtain the information, and the request must be made for the purpose of enforcing a law, carrying out an investigation or gathering intelligence. In contrast, section 16 of the Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement in the 21st Century Act contains no similar limitation: the designated person need only request the information.

You can’t really critique online privacy protection without knowing something about what privacy involves and how hard it is to maintain. A new book on the topic, just published by the Oxford University Press, is available for download under a Creative Commons license, “On the Identity Trail: Understanding the importance and impact of anonymity and authentication in an networked society”. Sponsored by the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and containing chapters from international experts and researchers, it’s a terrific basis for discussion on the issues underlying privacy and anonymity.

For example, the chapter on redeeming privacy for battered women describes ‘the feminist rejection of privacy’ and analyzes the need for privacy (enabling women to hide from their abusive partners) as well as its dangers (enabling domestic abuse to be carried out under the veil of family privacy). The book also has chapters on anonymity and the law in Canada, the US and other countries. And ‘Soul Train: the new surveillance in popular music’ looks at “the close links between surveillance and culture, and control and entertainment”.

Michael Geist, the Canadian law professor and anti-copyright hero, has posted an analysis of how copyright lobbying relies on

a clear strategy of deploying seemingly independent organizations to advance the same goals, claims, arguments, and recommendations. Over the past three years, this strategy has played out with multiple reports, each building on the next with a steady stream of self-citation.

This kind of analysis should be done more often in policy development. The use of self-referential key documents with overlapping contributors is probably pretty common, and not necessarily sinister. It’s a good case study of how advocacy groups can create a sense of momentum with relatively few papers and organizations that look independent but aren’t. However, it can also lead to bad policy based on an insufficient research base, as in the case of the emerging international copyright laws.