On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Prof. Michael Geist: "The longstanding debate over whether Bill C-18, the Online News Act, requires payment for linking came to an end yesterday. Government officials admitted that even basic quotes from news articles that include a hyperlink to the original source would scope user posts into the law and require platforms such as Google and Facebook to negotiate payment for the links. As noted below, even that position may understate the impact of the bill, which appears to also cover a user post of a news quote without a link. In other words, merely quoting a few sentences from a news article on an Internet platform is treated as making news content available, which triggers a requirement for the platforms to negotiate payment. This position runs counter to Canada’s copyright obligations under the Berne Convention and has no place in a country committed to freedom of expression."

How will this be made to affect us as individual internet users/publishers?

"What I've learned about myself is that there is no amount of time that can pass, there is no break that can happen. I just will never clean up the basement." - Mercer during an interview with Tom Power on Q, date currently unknown to me. Source: Sunday Edition essay by Michael Enright.

First time I'd seen a Max Planck quote at an activists' march on Parliament Hill.



Here's another one I liked from that march.

...that's been bothering me more and more of late, albeit for reasons unrelated to the concerns that Dr. Brin rightly continues to expound upon in recent years. From June Morgan, a minor agent of what few villains that novel contains references to:

"You're all so smart, so modern. You've got your info-plaques and percomps and loyal little ferret programs to go fetch data for you. But what information? Only what's in the Net, my dears."

There's an old quote that's been coming back to mind after reading news and opinion pieces from places ranging from CBC News to iPolitics.ca. It comes from a book about a TV series - one of the earliest examples of what we now call "dramedies" - a portmanteau showing the blending of comedy and drama - on American television that won many Canadian hearts as well.

“I think there is a misconception on the part of a lot of people in this country that Frank Burns is unusual. My hope is that they see he is not unusual. He is fairly ordinary. He comes in sleeker packages, God knows. I hope when people think about who they are going to vote for, or who they’re going to work for, or whatever, they cast an eye toward Frank Burns and say ‘Now, does this person behave the same way? Am I dealing with this kind of monster?.’ Watch for him, be careful of him. There are Frank Burnses everywhere. Learn to know the type. Don’t elect them. Don’t make them chairman of the board. Frank is a dangerous man because he acts without reason, often without true intelligence, and, perhaps more importantly, with no real knowledge or perception of what consequences an action will bring out. He is not a man with perception and, consequently, he is incredibly dangerous.”

- Larry Linville, interviewed by David S. Reiss for the book M*A*S*H - the exclusive inside story on TV's most popular show (1)

Putting that quote into a more recent, Canadian-minded context: I wonder if those who supported Stephen Harper and his fellow believers might not have had a certain dislike for M*A*S*H while it aired in first-run on TV. Certainly, they had problems with CBC, which had the Canadian first-run rights for the series.

(1) Well, the people at Bobbs-Merrill weren't exactly shy about picking a sub-title for promoting that book, were they?

I saw this image in the Toronto Star a few days ago, and thought the photographer lucked out on the timing of the shutter during that speech in Richmond Hill, Ontario. See for yourself. Source is credited in the resultant image.

( Op-Ed Photoshopping re: Canadian politics after the cut )

"Many couches have died for Don Cherry's jackets."