For those of you who haven't yet heard the news, CBC has lost the rights to the Hockey Night in Canada theme. You know the tune, "da dada dada, da dada dada..." -- I'd include an MP3 here but I'm having trouble finding one.

It turns out that the song's composer and owner Dolores Claman was asking for just too much money for the re-use of the song on the CBC. They offered her $1million and she turned it down, asking instead for a cool $2.5million to $3million! The CBC is taxpayer-funded people. It can't justify that kind of expense.

And so the song was instead sold to CTV/TSN, a component of CTV Globe Meia's massive conglomerate. They can afford an insane price for a jingle and frankly, it's quite the coup for them. Those notes are Canada's unofficial second anthem. Everyone knows it, and everyone knows it means hockey.

A lot of people are really pissed off about this, and they should be, but not for the reasons about which they seem to be shouting.

Some people are mad at Claman, who's simply exploiting an opportunity for the maximum available profit. It may be a pretty mean thing to do, but she "owns" the song and under our laws, she has every right to do what she's done.

Others are mad at the CBC for not just paying the $2.5million. I'm guessing that these people just have no understanding of what little money a public prodcaster has to work with.

No one however, is talking about the real problem here: that song has been part of Canadian culture for 40 years. Claman has been fully compensated under the terms of a financial contract for the entirety of those years and by all rights, the Canadian people should own that song to do with as we please.

How long should we allow copyright to exist on something so tightly woven into our culture? Isn't 40years of royalties enough to push a song into the public domain? Why should one person have the right to sign over the "ownership" of a song to a corporation in perpetuity?

Listening to CBC Radio One yesterday the broadcasters were joking about how they couldn't even hum it anymore, because the song is owned by someone else. One of the men thought he'd be light-hearted about the whole thing: "How 'bout we just do it one last time? Da dada dada --"

"Ahh, lets not do that" the second man cut in. Clearly, he was nervous about the legal implications of humming our unofficial national anthem.

Even if you're an avid follower of the news, you've probably missed it. Buried beneath the Pickton trial, Aqsa Parvez's murder and Schreiber vs. Mulroney, was a very important story: the Canadian version of the DMCA... it wasn't released to Parliament.

As a refresher for the uninitiated, the DMCA is essentially a copyright bill that runs things in the US. It's designed mostly to keep the copyright holders in power and keep those of us who would use "their" intellectual property to create our own art from doing so without permission. It's used as the backbone in lawsuits when the RIAA sues 12 year-olds for file sharing, and it prevents you from ripping CDs and DVDs or from doing research into important stuff like cryptography.

Anyway, until now Canadians haven't had to worry about this sort of bad policy, but today the Conservatives were supposed to unveil their new, even more restrictive version of the DMCA for Canada... but they didn't. Most likely due in large part to the major public outcry orchestrated by copyright activists like Michael Geist who understand the importance of copyright law.

This stuff is very much worth educating yourself about. Check out Geist's site and if you're interested, there's also the Facebook group, Boing Boing and of course, a Youtube video to show you what you can do.

Disc Drop

On a related subject, you might want to check out a new project by CBC's The Hour called Disc Drop. Here are the details taken straight from the site. I'm gonna get right on this. Anyone else interested?

There's nothing more satisfying than sharing the joy of music. Disc Drop is your chance to turn a total stranger on to the tunes that changed your life. Who knows? Maybe you'll change some-one else's life while you're at it.

• STEP 1: Make a mixed CD of your favourite tunes. Somewhere on the disc write: DISC DROP - cbc.ca/thehour. Be sure to include a track-listing so people can track down more music by the artists on your disc.
• STEP 2: Drop off your disc in a random public place.
• STEP 3: Go to the I Dropped a Disc - What Now, click on the comments, and write down where you dropped off your disc and the track-listing. Check back later to find out who picked it up, and where it's heading next.

This video is fucking brilliant. It's an argument about copyright and the problems with the concept of "fair use". Worth the 10 minutes of your time if only to see how it was impressively stitched together.

Months after successful discovery of the HD-DVD processing key, an unprecedented campaign of censorship, in the form of DMCA takedown notices by the MPAA, has hit the Net. For example Spooky Action at a Distance was killed. More disturbingly, my story got Dugg twice, with the second wave hitting 15,500 votes, and today I found out it had simply disappeared from Digg. How long until the long arm of the MPAA gets to my own site (run in Ecuador) and the rest of them holding the processing key? How long will we let rampant censorship go on, in the name of economic interest?

Rudd-O, Slashdot, Tuesday May 01, @03:44PM.

More details on what this key is and what it's for can be found here.

Update

Digg has decided to do the right thing. Kudos to them for taking this step, and to the community for forcing them down that path.