Quotulatiousness

June 5, 2019

Sensible proposals from the copyright review report

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Michael Geist summarizes the — seemingly quite sensible — recommendations from the copyright review process:

Assignments of copyrights photostat copies by mollyali (CC BY-NC 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/5JbsPE

In December 2017, the government launched its copyright review with a Parliamentary motion to send the review to the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology. After months of study and hundreds of witnesses and briefs, the committee released the authoritative review with 36 recommendations [PDF] that include expanding fair dealing, a rejection of a site blocking system, and a rejection of proposals to exclude education from fair dealing where a licence is otherwise available. The report represents a near-total repudiation of the one-sided Canadian Heritage report that was tasked with studying remuneration models to assist the actual copyright review. While virtually all stakeholders will find aspects they agree or disagree with, that is the hallmark of a more balanced approach to copyright reform.

This post highlights some of the most notable recommendations in the report that are likely to serve as the starting point for any future copyright reform efforts. There is a lot here but the key takeaways on the committee recommendations:

  • expansion of fair dealing by making the current list of fair dealing purposes illustrative rather than exhaustive (the “such as” approach)
  • rejection of new limits on educational fair dealing with further study in three years
  • retention of existing Internet safe harbour rules
  • rejection of the FairPlay site blocking proposal with insistence that any blocking include court oversight
  • expansion of the anti-circumvention rules by permitting circumvention of digital locks for purposes that are lawful (ie. permit circumvention to exercise fair dealing rights)
  • extend the term of copyright only if ratifying the USCMA and include a registration requirement for the additional 20 years
  • implement a new informational analysis exception
  • further study of statutory damages for all copyright collectives along with greater transparency
  • adoption of an open licence rather than the abolition of crown copyright

My submission to the Industry committee can be found here. The submission and my appearance is cited multiple times in the report and I’m grateful that the committee took the submissions from all witnesses seriously.

The four equal-ish regions of Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Reddit, u/the_vizir posted an interesting illustration of Canada divided into four regions of (approximately) equal population, based on the 2015 electoral map:

[Click to see full-size image]

I used this map of Canada’s Federal ridings by DrRandomFactor as a base. Then I attempted to mirror the original map’s divisions, tallying up the populations of the ridings, as based on this chart from Wikipedia.

Ultimately, the original map proved to be rather accurate in the West, but in the East it was off by quite a bit. Despite my best attempts, I could not get the entire Quebec City to Windsor corridor into two geographically contiguous regions. And so Windsor ultimately got shunted into the Great Orange North.

Interestingly, in terms of ridings, the four regions are also rather equal — which one might consider surprising given the population disparity between the largest and smallest ridings (the least populous riding, Labrador, has 27k people; while Brantford-Brant, the most populous, has 132k). However, in the end, the red region has 80 ridings, the green region 83, the purple region 86 and the orange region 89.

The 25 most populous urban areas within that large, orange region include:

  • Halifax, NS — 404k
  • Windsor, ON — 392k
  • St. John’s, NL — 205k
  • Barrie, ON — 197k
  • Sudbury, ON — 165k
  • Saguenay, PQ — 161k
  • Moncton, NB — 145k
  • Saint John, NB — 126k
  • Thunder Bay, ON –121k
  • Chatham-Kent, ON — 102k
  • Fredericton, NB –102k
  • Cape Breton, NS — 99k
  • Sarnia, ON – 96k
  • Prince George, BC — 86k
  • Sault Ste. Marie, ON — 78k
  • Fort McMurray. AB — 73k
  • North Bay, ON — 70k
  • Charlottetown, PE — 69k
  • Grande Prairie, AB — 63k
  • Rimouski, PQ — 55k
  • Shawinigan, PQ — 54k
  • Leamington, ON — 49k
  • Truro, NS — 46k
  • Prince Albert, SK — 44k
  • Rouyn-Noranda, PQ — 42k

Somewhat surprisingly, even on this list, no communities in the Territories make the cut. The largest urban area in the North, Whitehorse, is still only 39th on this list, between Fort St. John, BC and Baie-Comeau, PQ. Yellowknife is 48th, between North Battleford, SK and Yorkton, SK.

The smallest riding in the orange area is Charlottetown at 46 sq. km, followed by Windsor West at 83 sq. km and Dartmouth-Cole Harbour at 102 sq. km. The largest riding in one of the other regions is Cypress Hills-Grasslands at 77,822 sq. km, followed by Kootenay-Columbia at 60,405 sq. km and Souris-Moose Mountain at 43,184 sq. km. All of these were in the purple region and were, unfortunately, necessary to bridge Winnipeg to the Calgary-Edmonton corridor, and then the Calgary-Edmonton corridor to the Lower Mainland.

(To those just looking for random facts: the smallest riding of them all is Toronto Centre, at 6 sq. km, followed by Papineau at 10 sq. km and both Laurier-Sainte-Marie and Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie at 11 sq. km each. The largest ones are Nunavut at 2,093,190 sq. km, Northwest Territories at 1,346,106 sq. km and Abitibi-Baie-James-Nunavik-Eeyou at 854,754 sq. km. And no, that last one doesn’t have the longest riding name. That would be Leeds-Grenville-Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, coming in at 49 characters and beating out the previous champion, West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country).

H/T to halls of macademia for the link.

Battle of Ad Decimum 533 Roman – Vandalic War Documentary

Filed under: Africa, History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Kings and Generals
Published on 12 Nov 2017

Although Belisarius, the best general of the Roman Emperor Justinian, had earned a significant victory over the Sassanids at the battle of Dara in 530, the restoration of the empire was just starting. The empire’s western lands were under Vandalic control and Justinian was eager to get them back. He sent Belisarius to Africa to deal with the Vandals. Two battles – Ad Decimum and Tricamarum – were central in this campaign.

Previous video within this series – Battle of Dara 530: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GR_V…

Support us on Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/KingsandGenerals or Paypal: http://paypal.me/kingsandgenerals

We are grateful to our patrons, who made this video possible: Koopinator, Daisho, Łukasz Maliszewski, Nicolas Quinones, William Fluit, Juan Camilo Rodriguez, Murray Dubs, Dimitris Valurdos, Félix Gagné-Dion, Fahri Dashwali, Kyle Hooton, Dan Mullen, Mohamed Thair, Pablo Aparicio Martínez, Iulian Margeloiu, Chet, Nick Nasad, Jeyares, Amir Eppel, Thomas Bloch, Uri Sternfeld, Juha Mäkelä, Georgi Kirilov, Moe Mia, Daniel Yifrach, Brian Crane, Muramasa, Gerald Tnay, Hassan Ali, Richie Thierry, David O’Hare, Christopher Commins, Chris Glantzis and Mike.

The script was developed by our friend DismountedCentaur. His help with the research was essential for this documentary.

This video was narrated by good friend Officially Devin. Check out his channel for some kick-ass Let’s Plays. https://www.youtube.com/user/Official…

The Machinimas for this video are created by one more friend – Malay Archer. Check out his channel, he has some of the best Total War machinimas ever created: https://www.youtube.com/user/Mathemed…

The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls

Filed under: Cancon, History, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Chris Selley points out some odd blindspots in the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls:

“The violence the National Inquiry heard amounts to a race-based genocide of Indigenous Peoples, including First Nations, Inuit and Métis, which especially targets women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people,” the report declares. Among the first headlines was one noting that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “avoided” using the G-word in his remarks on its findings, settling for “shameful” and “unacceptable.”

The inquiry’s legal analysis concedes it is a novel deployment of the term. It seems far more comfortable alleging a historical genocide against “Indigenous Peoples” that involved specific targeting of women — for example through forced sterilization, which is acknowledged as a genocidal technique in the 1948 UN convention — than it does a genocide against Indigenous women and girls specifically. But the insistence upon the term speaks volumes about this peculiar inquiry’s tortured birth, and about some of its more perplexing recommendations.

Indigenous women have certainly been targets for violence and discrimination in particular ways throughout Canada’s history. Today they suffer disproportionately from violent crime, relative to Indigenous men, in a way that non-Indigenous women do not. The rate of self-reported sexual assault among Indigenous women in the 2014 General Social Survey (GSS) was more than triple that of non-Indigenous women. An astonishing 61 per cent of Indigenous women aged 15-25 reported violent victimization in the previous 12 months — nearly six times the rate for Indigenous men the same age.

But if Indigenous victims of violence even today can be said to be casualties of colonialist genocide, then the subset who are by far the most “especially targeted” — which is to say dead — are men. Between 2014 and 2017, Statistics Canada reports there were 139 Indigenous female homicide victims, and 428 Indigenous male victims — three times as many. (Similarly, non-Indigenous men were murdered two-and-a-half times more often than non-Indigenous women.)

[…]

But the obsession with half the Indigenous population leads to some bewildering recommendations, especially on the justice file. On the one hand the report inveighs against mandatory minimum sentences as a cause of Indigenous overrepresentation in the prison system, and calls for more robust applications of Gladue principles for all Indigenous offenders, which is to say more alternatives to incarceration; on the other hand it supports legislation that would require judges to punish violent offences more harshly if the victim is an Indigenous woman, and to automatically classify homicides occurring after “a pattern of intimate partner violence and abuse” as first-degree murder. This would almost certainly have the effect of increasing the incarceration rates of Indigenous men and women alike.

WWII Field Kitchen Overview

Filed under: Food, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tri-State Living History Association
Published on 15 Dec 2018

The GI Field Kitchen during WWII was part of the Company HQ, designed to serve 150-180 men. They intended to serve 2 hot meals per day: Breakfast & Supper, with Dinner (Lunch) as a combat ration. They were equipped with stoves, water heaters and mermite cans to deliver the hot food to the troops.

While sound in theory, often times in reality the kitchens had to make do with less equipment and were forced to adapt to the situations in which they were forced to operate. Despite this, mess staff did their best to keep the fighting man’s body and morale fed.

Filmed at Rockford WWII Days 2018

Special thanks to Nick Yi Photography: https://www.nickyi.com/

Website: https://www.tslha.org/

Print Sources:

TM 10-405 (Apr 24, 1942) – The Army Cook

TM 10-406 (Nov 22, 1943) – Cooking Dehydrated Foods

TM 10-400 (Nov, 1944) – Stoves, Ranges, Ovens, and Cooking Outfits

TM 10-701 (Dec, 1945) – Range, Field M-1937

T/O 7-17 (Sept 1, 1942): http://www.hardscrabblefarm.com/ww2/

Footage Sources:

The Battle of San Pietro – John Huston (1945)

TF 10-1237 – Rations in the Combat Zone Part 1 – Fighting Food

TF 10-1215 – Rations in the Combat Zone Part 2 – Unit Messing

TF 10-2454 – Unit Messing in the Field

TF 10-1202 – Baking in the Field Part 1 – The M1942 Field Baking Unit

MISC 1282 – Quartermaster Activities in the European Theater

Picture Sources: 185th Field Artillery, 34th ID from the H. Smith collection: http://34thinfantry.com/photos.html

QotD: The almost unknown economic good news since 1800

Filed under: Economics, History, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Ordinary people, and some economists, and even a few economic historians, don’t know it. Hans Rosling, the late, great Swedish professor of public health, emphasized how little most people, even very well-informed people, know about the overwhelmingly good news 1800 to the present, or even 1960 to the present (e.g., falling birth rates, falling infant death rates, rising literacy). He surveyed people, in his various audiences to the number of 20,000. They were embarrassingly less accurate on the whole than monkeys would be throwing darts at the multiple choice possibilities. And the human experts, with ordinary citizens, were always biased in a pessimistic, anti-modern direction. Consider Kenneth Pomeranz, in his fine book with Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created. Pomeranz and Topik tell many interesting and accurate stories about the bad side of creative destruction (which comes from any human progress, not as is often said on the left from “neo-liberalism”). But they never acknowledge the gigantic improvements coming from it for ordinary people. Not once.

Dierdre McCloskey, “How Growth Happens: Liberalism, Innovism, and the Great Enrichment (Preliminary version)” [PDF], 2018-11-29.

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