Quotulatiousness

April 3, 2012

Popehat tells Arizona “Come Get Me, Coppers!”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:44

Arizona has a law on the books that should replace the old chestnut about King Canute and the tide: they’ve criminalized annoying and offending people on the internet:

Dear Members of the Arizona State Legislature,

By this post, it is my specific intent to use this digital device — a computer — to annoy and offend you.

I do so because you have passed Arizona H.B. 2549, which provides in relevant part as follows:

    It is unlawful for any person, with intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend, to use a telephone ANY ELECTRONIC OR DIGITAL DEVICE and use any obscene, lewd or profane language or suggest any lewd or lascivious act, or threaten to inflict physical harm to the person or property of any person.

OK. I certainly don’t intend to convey any physical threat. And I can’t terrify or intimidate you, even with the prospect of revealing you for a pack of morons who ought to be voted out of office — after all, you’re in Arizona, where prolonged lawlessness, venality and idiocy seem to be sure paths to electoral victory.

I certainly do mean to annoy and offend you, though. You’ve been swept up in the moronic and thoughtless anti-bullying craze and consequently passed a bill that is ridiculous on its face, a bill that criminalizes annoying and offending people on the internet. That’s like criminalizing driving on the road. By so clearly violating the First Amendment, you’ve violated your oaths of office. You should be ashamed of yourselves. What kind of example are you setting for the children of Arizona by ignoring the law to pass fashionable rubbish? It is no excuse that you are merely modifying an archaic law to apply it to the internet — you’re still enacting patently unconstitutional legislation.

That’s Ken at Popehat, inviting the Arizona state legislature to “snort my taint, go to Hell, and go fuck yourselves”.

Eliminating inter-provincial barriers to trade

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Law, Liberty, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:43

Confederation in 1867 was supposed to create a single nation out of a group of separate British colonies in North America. In spite of that, in some areas, individual provinces treat one another as foreign entities for trading purposes. Alcohol, for example, is one product that gets special treatment for inter-provincial sales — almost always to interfere with or even prevent the purchase of alcohol in one province for consumption in another. 680News reports on the latest effort to harmonize the rules regarding alcohol sales across provincial borders:

Free my grapes will be the rallying cry on Parliament Hill on Tuesday as a committee hears from supporters of a private member’s bill seeking to erase a 1928 rule that restricts individuals from bringing wine across provincial borders.

Shirley-Ann George ran into that problem when she was visiting B.C. and then tried to join a wine club through a vineyard there, only to be told the vineyard couldn’t ship to her home in Ontario.

She decided to start up the Alliance of Canadian Wine Consumers to try to change it.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” is the most common refrain from people first learning about the rule, George said.

“Most Canadians don’t even know it is illegal. They think it’s silly, archaic and it’s time that the government started to think in the 21st century.”

Of course, the provinces are not keen to allow individuals to buy wine directly — that might threaten their respective monopolies (and the juicy profits they derive from being “the only game in town”). One of their current arguments against the bill is that it will somehow give Canadian wines an unfair advantage and that could cause issues with our international trade partners. I’m not sure how it benefits Canadian wineries to be shut out of selling to Canadian wine drinkers in other provinces, but I’m sure that they have some cockamamie statistical “proof” that they’ll trot out to bolster their argument.

A “routine” traffic stop in Collinsville, Illinois

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:17

Radley Balko tells the full story of a traffic stop in Illinois that demonstrates how eager some police departments are to use “asset forfeiture” to get their hands on the property of innocent people:

Last December, filmmaker Terrance Huff and his friend Jon Seaton were returning to Ohio after attending a “Star Trek” convention in St. Louis. As they passed through a small town in Illinois, a police officer, Michael Reichert, pulled Huff’s red PT Cruiser over to the side of the road, allegedly for an unsafe lane change. Over the next hour, Reichert interrogated the two men, employing a variety of police tactics civil rights attorneys say were aimed at tricking them into giving up their Fourth Amendment rights. Reichert conducted a sweep of Huff’s car with a K-9 dog, then searched Huff’s car by hand. Ultimately, he sent Huff and Seaton on their way with a warning.

Earlier this month, Huff posted to YouTube audio and video footage of the stop taken from Reichert’s dashboard camera. No shots were fired in the incident. No one was beaten, arrested or even handcuffed. Reichert found no measurable amount of contraband in Huff’s car. But Huff’s 17-and-a-half minute video raises important questions about law enforcement and the criminal justice system, including the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, the drug war, profiling and why it’s so difficult to take problematic cops out of the police force.

[. . .]

“When we saw the Huff video in our office, we just laughed,” Rekowski says. “Not because it wasn’t outrageous. But because it’s the kind of thing we see all the time. The stop for a so-called ‘inappropriate lane change,’ the games they play in the questioning, the claims about nervousness or inappropriate behavior that can’t really be contradicted. It’s all routine.”

According to Koester, the defense attorney in private practice, “The dog alert that happens off-camera isn’t unusual either. You see that all the time.”

Koester and Rekowski say the Huff stop has all the markings of a forfeiture fishing expedition. “You see where he asks if [Huff] is carrying large amounts of U.S. currency,” Rekowski says. “It’s pretty clear what they’re after. These kinds of cases put my kids through college.” He laughs, then adds, “I’m only half joking.”

H/T again to Jon, my former virtual landlord.

April 1, 2012

“Off the Somali coast, everyone is looking for a big payday”

Filed under: Africa, Law, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:54

Strategy Page on recent developments in the anti-piracy campaign off the Somali coast:

To get around laws, in many ports, forbidding weapons aboard merchant ships, security companies operating off the Somali coast have equipped small ships to serve as floating arsenals. The security guards boards, in port, the merchant ships they are guarding, then meet up with the gun ship in international waters so the guards can get their weapons and ammo. The process is reversed when the merchant ships approach their destinations or leave pirate infested waters (and put the armed guards off onto the gun ship.) Maritime lawyers fret that there are no proper laws to regulate these floating armories, or that if there are applicable laws, everyone is not following them. It’s also feared that some enterprising lawyers will seek to represent the families of pirates shot by these armed guards. Off the Somali coast, everyone is looking for a big payday.

In the last three years, more and more merchant ships, despite the high expense, have hired armed guards when travelling near the “Pirate Coast” of Somalia. It began when France put detachments of troops on tuna boats operating in the Indian Ocean, and Belgium then supplied detachments of soldiers for Belgium ships that must move near the Somali coast. These armed guards are not cheap, with detachments costing up to $200,000 a week. There are now over a dozen private security companies offering such services. What makes the armed guards so attractive is the fact that no ship carrying them has ever been captured by pirates. That may eventually change, but for the moment, the pirates avoid ships carrying armed guards and seek less well-defended prey.

March 31, 2012

Nick Gillespie on the “bully” crisis that isn’t

Filed under: Education, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:35

There’s an ongoing major media story about bullies, but Nick Gillespie says the crisis doesn’t really exist:

“When I was younger,” a remarkably self-assured, soft-spoken 15-year-old kid named Aaron tells the camera, “I suffered from bullying because of my lips—as you can see, they’re kind of unusually large. So I would kind of get [called] ‘Fish Lips’—things like that a lot—and my glasses too, I got those at an early age. That contributed. And the fact that my last name is Cheese didn’t really help with the matter either. I would get [called] ‘Cheeseburger,’ ‘Cheese Guy’—things like that, that weren’t really very flattering. Just kind of making fun of my name—I’m a pretty sensitive kid, so I would have to fight back the tears when I was being called names.”

It’s hard not to be impressed with — and not to like — young Aaron Cheese. He is one of the kids featured in the new Cartoon Network special “Stop Bullying: Speak Up,” which premiered last week and is available online. I myself am a former geekish, bespectacled child whose lips were a bit too full, and my first name (as other kids quickly discovered) rhymes with two of the most-popular slang terms for male genitalia, so I also identified with Mr. Cheese. My younger years were filled with precisely the sort of schoolyard taunts that he recounts; they led ultimately to at least one fistfight and a lot of sour moods on my part.

Ah, yes, the joy of classmates discovering that “Nick” is such a useful name for casual abuse. It was part of the reason I’ve insisted on using “Nicholas” ever since I got into the working world. Bullies were certainly part of my early school experience, and that of my own son. Rather like the changing of the seasons, they were just part of the school environment. I got into a few fights, but quickly learned that most other boys had a weight and reach advantage over me that resulted in a fairly quick end to each fight. The bullying tapered off in high school, but I tried to minimize the opportunities for it to happen, too. I have very few remaining friends from school — but that’s partly a reflection of the fact that I had relatively few friends in school.

Part of the perceived problem with bullies is that parents are much more involved in their kids’ lives than earlier generations:

How did we get here? We live in an age of helicopter parents so pushy and overbearing that Colorado Springs banned its annual Easter-egg hunt on account of adults jumping the starter’s gun and scooping up treat-filled plastic eggs on behalf of their winsome kids. The Department of Education in New York City — once known as the town too tough for Al Capone — is seeking to ban such words as “dinosaurs,” “Halloween” and “dancing” from citywide tests on the grounds that they could “evoke unpleasant emotions in the students,” it was reported this week. (Leave aside for the moment that perhaps the whole point of tests is to “evoke unpleasant emotions.”)

Politicians, always eager to be seen to be “doing something”, are lining up to “do something” about bullying:

Last year, in response to the suicide of the 18-year-old gay Rutgers student Tyler Clementi, the state legislature passed “The Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights.” The law is widely regarded as the nation’s toughest on these matters. It has been called both a “resounding success” by Steve Goldstein, head of the gay-rights group Garden State Equality, and a “bureaucratic nightmare” by James O’Neill, the interim school superintendent of the township of Roxbury. In Congress, New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg and Rep. Rush Holt have introduced the federal Tyler Clementi Higher Education Anti-Harassment Act.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has called the Lautenberg-Holt proposal a threat to free speech because its “definition of harassment is vague, subjective and at odds with Supreme Court precedent.” Should it become law, it might well empower colleges to stop some instances of bullying, but it would also cause many of them to be sued for repressing speech. In New Jersey, a school anti-bullying coordinator told the Star-Ledger that “The Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights” has “added a layer of paperwork that actually inhibits us” in dealing with problems. In surveying the effects of the law, the Star-Ledger reports that while it is “widely used and has helped some kids,” it has imposed costs of up to $80,000 per school district for training alone and uses about 200 hours per month of staff time in each district, with some educators saying that the additional effort is taking staff “away from things such as substance-abuse prevention and college and career counseling.”

Bullying is a problem, but it’s neither new nor growing:

But is bullying — which the stopbullying.gov website of the Department of Health and Human Services defines as “teasing,” “name-calling,” “taunting,” “leaving someone out on purpose,” “telling other children not to be friends with someone,” “spreading rumors about someone,” “hitting/kicking/pinching,” “spitting” and “making mean or rude hand gestures” — really a growing problem in America?

Despite the rare and tragic cases that rightly command our attention and outrage, the data show that things are, in fact, getting better for kids. When it comes to school violence, the numbers are particularly encouraging. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, between 1995 and 2009, the percentage of students who reported “being afraid of attack or harm at school” declined to 4% from 12%. Over the same period, the victimization rate per 1,000 students declined fivefold.

March 30, 2012

“Fifty-six days. Two months. In an actual jail. For tweeting”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:54

Brendan O’Neill on Britain joining China and Iran in punishing free speech:

This week, Britain became a fully paid-up member of that clique of illiberal intolerant, tweeter-harassing states.

On Tuesday, at Swansea Magistrates Court in Wales, Liam Stacey, a student, was imprisoned for 56 days for writing offensive tweets.

Fifty-six days. Two months. In an actual jail. For tweeting. It needs to be spelt out like that in order to show how shocking it is that in the 21st century, in a nation that gave us such great warriors for freedom as The Levellers and John Stuart Mill, a young man has now been banged up for expressing his thoughts.

Stacey’s thoughts were far from pleasant ones. In fact they were offensive and repugnant.

What kind of freedom of speech do you have when you can be punished for expressing unpopular and idiotic sentiments? None whatsoever. When you’re only free to mouth the mainstream popular opinions — or what the state tells you is acceptable — you don’t have freedom of speech at all.

When other tweeters complained to Stacey about his off-colour comments, he started to use racist language. He told his detractors to “f**k off”, and hurled pretty much every racial slur under the sun at them.

The Twitterati reported him to the police. And sure enough he got a visit from the cops, was charged with committing a racially aggravated public order offence, and now finds himself in the clink alongside burglars and rapists.

Yes, Stacey’s comments were horrible. But this was speech rather than actions, the use of words rather than the use of fists, and there should never be any state involvement, certainly not arrests and showtrials, in the arena of speech.

In finding himself incarcerated simply because he refused to “Pray for Muamba” and then expressed nasty racist thoughts, Stacey has effectively been punished for committing a thoughtcrime, or perhaps its modern equivalent: a tweetcrime.

March 27, 2012

Reason.tv: Obamacare goes to the Supreme Court

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 14:33

Does the fate of a federal government with limited powers rest in the hands of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia? And if so, will he rule against broad federal powers (as he did in the Gonzales case) or in favor of the feds’ right to regulate just about anything (as he did in the Raich case)?

The Supreme Court case over The Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, “is certainly the most important case on the reach of federal power in 50 years” says attorney and legal scholar Timothy Sandefur of the Pacific Legal Foundation. “The constitutional principle of where is the line drawn on federal power — that’s a matter that our children and grandchildren will have to live with.”

The ruling will come sometime in early June, predicts Sandefur, who tells Reason.tv that the Affordable Care Act raises multiple constitutional issues: Can part of the law be struck down and other upheld? Is the “individual mandate,” which forces all Americans to purchase insurance as a condition of simply being alive, legal? Does the law’s massive expansion of Medicaid shred the right of states to govern their own finances?

March 26, 2012

Court rules that prostitution is still legal in Canada, strikes down other parts of law

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:32

Yes, prostitution is still legal … but some of the worst restrictions hedging it around have been declared unconstitutional:

The Court of Appeal for Ontario has swept aside some of the country’s anti-prostitution laws saying they place unconstitutional restrictions on prostitutes’ ability to protect themselves.

The landmark decision means sex workers will be able to hire drivers, bodyguards and support staff and work indoors in organized brothels or “bawdy houses,” while “exploitation” by pimps remains illegal.

However, openly soliciting customers on the street remains prohibited with the judges deeming that “a reasonable limit on the right to freedom of expression.”

The province’s highest court suspended the immediate implementation of striking the bawdy house law for a year to allow the government an opportunity to amend the Criminal Code.

[. . .]

The appeal stems from the legal oddity that while prostitution was not illegal, many activities surrounding it were, including running a brothel or bawdy house, communicating for the purpose of prostitution and living on money earned by a prostitute.

That disconnect led to a constitutional challenge mounted by three sex trade workers who say the laws prevented them from taking basic safety precautions, such as hiring a bodyguard, working indoors or spending time assessing potential clients in public.

March 25, 2012

Britain’s stealth decriminalization of marijuana

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:18

An interesting post at The Economist on the recent changes to law and police practices in Britain in regard to cannabis cultivation and consumption:

Small growers are squeezing out both importers and the well-connected, often Vietnamese, gangs that once dominated domestic production. The big cannabis factories set up by the latter, with their telltale heat hazes, are fairly easy to spot. Smaller operations are often uncovered only when the electric lights start fires, or when local teenagers mount a burglary.

The police and the courts can neither keep up with the surge in small-scale production, nor are they desperately keen to do so. Last month the government published new sentencing guidelines that advised judges to treat small cultivators less strictly. Attitudes to smokers are softening, too. The reclassification of cannabis in 2009, from class C to the more stringent class B, was oddly accompanied by a more liberal approach to policing consumption. Users caught on the street are rarely arrested; rather, they are issued “cannabis cautions” (a reprimand which doesn’t appear on a criminal record) or fined.

[. . .]

Strangely, this lackadaisical approach is not encouraging people to take up the reefer habit. According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, the proportion of people who admit to having used cannabis in Britain has fallen more quickly than in any other European country over the past few years. Just 6.8% of adults told another survey that they used cannabis in 2010, down from 10.9% eight years earlier. The herb is now ubiquitous and effectively tolerated — and, perhaps as a result, not all that alluring.

Reason.tv: 3 Reasons to End Obamacare Before it Begins!

Filed under: Economics, Government, Health, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:36

There are more than ten reasons to oppose bill C-10

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:05

But I guess we have to start somewhere. Trinda L. Ernst has an article in the Toronto Star which compiles the top ten reasons to oppose the Conservatives’ most recent “tough on crime” bill:

Bill C-10 is titled The Safe Streets and Communities Act — an ironic name, considering that Canada already has some of the safest streets and communities in the world and a declining crime rate. This bill will do nothing to improve that state of affairs but, through its overreach and overreaction to imaginary problems, Bill C-10 could easily make it worse. It could eventually create the very problems it’s supposed to solve.

Bill C-10 will require new prisons; mandate incarceration for minor, non-violent offences; justify poor treatment of inmates and make their reintegration into society more difficult. Texas and California, among other jurisdictions, have already started down this road before changing course, realizing it cost too much and made their justice system worse. Canada is poised to repeat their mistake.

[. . .]

Canadians deserve accurate information about Bill C-10, its costs and its effects. This bill will change our country’s entire approach to crime at every stage of the justice system. It represents a huge step backwards; rather than prioritizing public safety, it emphasizes retribution above all else. It’s an approach that will make us less safe, less secure, and ultimately, less Canadian.

H/T to Bren McKenna for sending me the link.

March 23, 2012

Software patents: a legal minefield with no accurate maps

Filed under: Economics, Law, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:33

In the Atlantic, Timothy B. Lee explains why most software companies are effectively ignoring the patent system:

A major reason for the recent explosion of patent litigation is that it’s hard for software firms to figure out which patents they’re in danger of infringing. There are hundreds of thousands of software patents in existence, with more than 40,000 new ones issued each year. Indeed, in a recent paper, Christina Mulligan and I estimated that it’s effectively impossible for all software-producing firms to do the legal research, known as a “freedom-to-operate” (FTO) search, required to avoid infringing software patents — there simply aren’t enough patent attorneys to do the work. That’s a major reason why most software firms simply ignore the patent system.

One of the striking things about the patent debate is vast gulf between the views of computer programmers on the one hand and patent attorneys on the other. Steve Lundberg is a patent attorney and blogger who mentioned our paper in a blog post exploring the challenges of performing FTO searches in the software industry. I don’t want to pick on Lundberg, because I think you’d get similar arguments from many patent lawyers. But his post shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how the software industry works.

I work in the software industry (although not as a programmer), and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen software patents granted for things that clearly do not meet the stated criteria for granting patents. It could be a geeky party drinking game: guess whether a particular common programming technique or decades-old user interface element is patented or not, take a drink when you guess wrong. It’d be educational, although guessing “patented” every time might leave you stone cold sober at the end of the party.

As a matter of patent theory, Lundberg is absolutely correct. Patent law’s novelty and obviousness requirements are supposed to narrow the scope of patent protection. But in practice he’s dead wrong. The patent office issues a seemingly endless stream of patents on broad, obvious concepts like emoticon menus, one-click shopping, and wireless email.

And the existence of these broad, obvious patents means that software companies are constantly infringing each other’s patents by accident. The companies with the largest patent portfolios, such as Microsoft and IBM, have tens of thousands of patents, allowing them to credibly threaten almost anyone in the software industry. Even Yahoo, with its relatively modest cache of 1000 patents, was able to find ten patents to assert against Facebook.

March 19, 2012

Illinois railfan photographer threatened with being added to terror watch list

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:17

Photography within 550 feet of a railway line is illegal in Illinois, according to a police deputy who likes to make up his own laws:

A man who was taking pictures near a train track in Illinois was confronted by a sheriff’s deputy who informed him that he was breaking the law, so therefore he had no choice but to report the photographer to Homeland Security.

The photographer, who describes himself as a disabled war veteran and former state worker, was left wondering if the deputy had any legal basis for adding him to a terrorist watch list.

[. . .]

RustyBug, who never states which sheriff’s department harassed him, said the deputy told him it was against the law to shoot within 550 feet from train tracks, which is complete hogwash.

RustyBug said he really wasn’t buying it, but he wasn’t sure either, which shows us the importance of knowing the law when it comes to photography because too many cops don’t know the law.

March 15, 2012

The Omnibus Crime bill is really about only one thing: harsher punishments

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

If anyone thought that the Conservative government had a libertarian streak, the Omnibus Crime bill should be enough to disabuse them of the notion:

The Conservative government’s omnibus crime bill passed the Commons on Monday night. No matter the problem, the solution this unimaginative legislation provides is the same: longer sentences.

[. . .]

An important one that seems to have escaped the government’s thinking is whether, absent any other constructive reforms, it is a good thing to increase the powers of the police and prosecutors, and the effect it will have on the administration of justice. The government prefers to talk about criminals, as if everyone picked up by the police is guilty. Never discussed is the impact increased sentences will have on the accused but not convicted, namely, those presumed innocent.

In the daily operation of the criminal justice system, more severe penalties enhance the power the police and prosecutors have over the accused, or those merely suspected. The Americans have gone to such an extreme that the presumption of innocence is becoming only a notion; so severe are the penalties that police and prosecutors are able to bully even the innocent into pleading guilty. The trial in American criminal justice has been usurped by the plea bargain, in which the prosecutors hold most of the cards.

Canada is not there (yet), but it has happened here. In Ontario, the Goudge inquiry into parents falsely convicted of killing their own children established the pattern. Parents were threatened by prosecutors with such severe consequences that they pleaded guilty to crimes they did not commit, in the meagre hope of salvaging something of their lives.

[. . .]

There really isn’t very much “omni” in the omnibus crime bill. It’s about one thing — harsher punishments. It does nothing to alleviate the disgusting pre-trial (pre-trial!) conditions of remand that prevail in too many jails. It does nothing to mitigate the crisis in legal aid. It does nothing to lessen the likelihood of wrongful convictions. As Chief McFee notes, it does nothing for prevention.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guards themselves? Who watches the watchmen? That’s the ancient maxim. The crime bill shows that those guarding the guards are not on duty.

March 14, 2012

Michael Geist rounds up the changes to Bill C-11

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:58

It’s not wonderful, but as he points out, it could have been much worse:

In the days leading up to the clause-by-clause review, many focused on three key issues: no SOPA-style amendments such as website blocking or warrantless disclosure of information, maintaining the fair dealing balance found in the bill, and amending the digital lock provisions. By that standard, the changes could have been a lot worse. The government expanded the enabler provision, though not as broadly as CIMA requested. Virtually all other copyright lobby demands – website blocking, notice-and-takedown, iPod tax, copyright term extension, disclosure of subscriber information – were rejected. Moreover, the provisions supported by consumer and education groups including user generated content protection, time shifting, format shifting, backup copies, Internet provider liability, and statutory damages reform were left untouched. This represents a major victory for the many Canadians and groups such as Open Media that spoke out on these issues.

The fair dealing provision was similarly left unchanged despite a full court press from publishers and copyright collectives who sought elimination of the education category within fair dealing (didn’t happen), inclusion of the Berne three step test in the law (didn’t happen) or a new fair dealing test that overrules the Supreme Court of Canada CCH test (didn’t happen). The expanded fair dealing provision will not cause the horrors claimed by those groups and it is heartening that the government dismissed the misinformation campaign.

The only loss was the least surprising — digital locks. Despite widespread support for compromise legislation and sensible amendments from both the NDP and Liberals, the government rejected any changes. Given the government’s consistent support for digital locks, the ongoing pressure from the U.S., and Prime Minister Harper’s direct intervention on the issue in 2010, amending the digital lock rules presented a major challenge. Government MPs yesterday emphasized the possibility of future new exceptions via regulation but that will be cold comfort in the short term to those with perceptual disabilities, researchers, documentary film makers, consumers, and the many others adversely affected by the restrictive approach. In fact, one NDP MP raised the possibility of constitutional challenges to the bill.

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