Petition for Users' Rights

If I have to stand on a soapbox, it will be about intellectual property. There is currently a petition going around to petition parliment to consider the rights of, and to consult with, users and consumers of intellectual property. Normally those with the loudest voices (i.e. people hired by industry groups to be professional complainers) and the most money are those which have the ears of the policy makers. Average people need to yell a little bit on issues they care about, or pretty soon there won't be anything to care about.

The petition site is http://www.digital-copyright.ca/petition/. Links to english and french versions of the petition form are there, as are addresses of the people to mail it to once you have collected signatures.

This is not your average internet petition to save a TV show or whatever. Submitting electronically is not possible. This is an actual real life, dead tree, meat space petition which is to be submitted to Parliment. The people organizing this want to get this in before parliment tables a bill, as promised, to re-jigger copyright law in Canada as per the request of SOCAN and others. As such, it is necessary to print out the form and sign it, then mail it to one of the people listed on the web page. Since there is lots of room for signatures, it's probably a good idea to hit your friends up for their signatures too. If you are really outgoing (or even just average), ask you neighbours, co-workers, and random people on the street too (I admittedly will not be doing this).

Most people won't care until they have to pay a licence fee to take a book out of the library. So try to convince them not to let that happen.