All day today I've heard and seen the news talking about the wonderful actions and reactions of the Canadian public in the past 17 days. Just this hour I watched VANOC CEO John Furlong talk about how incredible the Canadian public has been - including their singing the Canadian National Anthem at the drop of a hat...

but nobody has thanked Mark Donnelly for getting the Canadian public primed for the Olympics!!!

Sometimes you just have to push back against those who don't get it. The publishing business is in general decline. Self-publishing is rising and society is moving away from following the publisher and toward following the individual writer. Some publishers still have terms of service that are 19th Century style and onerous - give up all your rights and those of your first-born too, etc.

I don't give in to this kind of thing and you probably should not either. The musicians and other performers are pushing back and it's time the general public did too.

I sent in a piece to the Province newspaper and got the following as a reply:

The following was sent to the Province Newspaper and Ros Guggi, Deputy Editor, in reply...

The USA passed their DMCA back in October of 1998, and it seems they've been trying to get the rest of the world to suffer along with them because they can't get rid of it.

The leaked list of those countries objecting to opening up the currently secret ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) I note that the United States is top of the list. Their stance is that all countries should enact laws that are similar to, and in fact worse than, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I can't help wondering if this is really all about "counterfeiting" or if it is simply that they're suffering because of their rush to the DMCA and want us all to suffer along with them. It's much easier to get us to pass new legislation than it is to fix their own or repeal it.

Defective By Design - that's what their site is called, and they write exclusively about Digital Rights Management. Their most recent post is a timeline of the march of DRM over the past decade, from shortly before the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed, through the debacle of the Sony rootkit, to Amazon's deletion of purchased copies of Orwell's 1984 on the Kindle.

An interesting read - and links to the articles that give the details on each item.

The question that hit me today is: If a computer program creates music, how long does the copyright last?

I write about copyright. It has been one of the things I've been pushed into since we had our early ISP, Wimsey. The typical length of a copyright is life plus 50 years. Some countries are pushing this to life plus 70 years. Leaving aside the various arguments pro and con on the actual length, let's talk about "life" in this context.

The question popped into my mind as I was reading this article on the work of David Cope, a UC Santa Cruz professor emeritus in music. He has created a program that can write chorales in the spirit of Bach such that most people can't tell which was written by the software running on a machine and which are original Bach works.

Maybe the life is "life of the author of the software" or maybe it is "the copyright period of the software" (which is author's life plus 50 years) - which would make the copyright on the music created be David Cope's life plus 50 years (the author) plus another 50 years for the "life" of the software. Kind of a second order "life" time.

So what do we do when the software is declared to be alive? Artificial Intelligence (AI) is getting close - at least we have not yet given up on it. At what point do we fall off the cliff of speculation into the reality of having created life from software - and how long will it live?

Our copyright laws need to take this into consideration - especially since Emmy, the name of the music writing software, wrote 5,000 Bach-inspired pieces in the time it took David to go out for a sandwich. A couple of dozen such machines could saturate all the various genres of music with works in a matter of days, locking other composers out of earning a living.

Think about it. I'm really musing on (literally) Life.

It turns out that all the problems I've had with my computer system these past couple of months, other than the failed hard drive, have been because of a bad memory card.

My workstation is pretty big - in both physical and computer sense. I have 3 monitor cards, currently with 4 monitors spread in front of me. The system is a AMD quad-core processor with 8 Gigabytes of RAM and 3 Terabytes of disk configured so I see 2 Terabytes, the rest being mirrors/spares

Most of the time my machine has lots of spare RAM - my system meter shows it is using about 1.8 Gigs at the moment, and it typically is something less than 6 Gigs used for programs - the rest the system uses to help make the disk faster.

I thought I had some problems with some new software I'm running - a "latest and greatest" version of Linux with some speed-up items in it. I was dreading having to downgrade the system back to an older version.

The problems have been things like the browsers failing and closing - or difficulty with my email. Nothing that did any direct damage, at least until yesterday. Yesterday I pulled about 300 images off my camera and set my system to creating thumbnails of them - and noticed 3 images that were badly mauled in the process. This just could not be the operating system - so I booted up the system with a memory tester and low and behold - it failed!!!.

I traced the problem to one of the four modules - and had to downgrade to only 4 Gigs of RAM. I purchased a replacement set and here we are, back up and running and stable again. Whooopppppeeeeee!!!!

I'll be thinking of you while I'm up in the British Columbia rain forest. We're filming bears, wolves and all manner of wildlife in the Great Bear Rainforest.

Join us... and the animals of the forest.

While I'm up visiting Ian McAllister - you should visit his works

Try "The Last Wild Wolves" - wonderful!

BC has an incredible wealth in "out there" - wilderness. I'm blessed with a trip out there for the next 3 days - and the potential to see some of our bears, wolves and other creatures in their natural habitat.

I'm mostly an urban person. I don't go hiking anymore, nor camping - no time and I'm getting older. But I appreciate the wild and relish the opportunity to visit.

My friend, Andy Wright, has put together an petition and a book, Faltering Light - please visit and if you can find it in your heart to sign the petition, please do so.