A reader writes: I understand you dislike CBC.  Well that is fine for you, but for those of us who don't want to listen to the local shows made up of canned music and dubious prattle, the CBC treats their listeners as intelligent human beings. Just don't listen if you dislike the station. Point taken. I feel odd defending myself against the proposition that I dislike the CBC, but given recent posts (here and here), I suppose it's an understandable assumption. As an immigrant who came to Canada after my schooling had ended, I learned most of what...

Robert Creighton writes: As happens in most places when Street View goes live, I predict the local media will run around the streets trying to find locals who are outraged at the "invasion of privacy" introduced by this technology. I will be watching Tom Murphy on CBC News as they try to stir up yet another "controversy." Worth noting that the cameras used in UK seem to be much higher resolution than used here. No idea what Tom will do, but in recent weeks, CBC has been conspicuously indulging the hoary tradition whereby old media condemn the moral decay promoted by attractive new-media...

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, whose interview on Spark was the subject of a somewhat testy post on Contrarian yesterday, has returned fire. I saw your blog entry on my interview with CBC and my book "Delete". From your entry it is obvious that you have not read the book. [True.] That's perfectly fine - except that you then move to render a flawed judgment on the book. To start with, the example that I used in the interview is not about photographic memory, but about a biological condition of a very small number of people who cannot forget - or at least remember a...

The excellent CBC Radio show, blog, and podcast known as Spark has just posted host Nora Young's  long interview with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Mayer-Schönberger believes cheap digital storage has encouraged us, often unwittingly, to store more information than is good for us. In the interview, he offers two examples: Some people with photographic memory have trouble making decisions, because memories of bad outcomes from previous decisions paralyze them. A Canadian psychotherapist, Andrew Feldmar, was permanently barred from entering the United States because a US border guard, using Google, discovered a 10-year-old article he...

This month, Apple approved a free CBC Radio app that offers yet another reason to own an iPhone. It will prove a boon to radio listeners not tied to their radios all day. The CBC Radio app will give iPhone or iPod users live audio streams from of Radio 1, 2, and 3 (the corp's net-based, indy-oriented network). It will let users listen in any time zone, so when Atlantic Canadians miss a national program, they have four chances to catch up. Want to listen to a local show in real time? Pick it off the station menu (below left), our use...

CopyCon Ministers - cropped
Why is Canada's news media doing such a shoddy job covering the copyright consultations now taking place in select cities across part of Canada? At the heart of the consultations on planned changes Canada's copyright law lies a fundamental question: Should the law protect authors of creative work, or corporate intermediaries who traditionally profited from the massive effort formerly required to reproduce and distribute them? Thanks to digital technology, the cost of copying and distributing works is rapidly approaching zero. Naturally, those who once profited from copying and distributing creative works are frantically trying to stem the flow of creative works, advocating ever-lengthening copyright protection,  and mandatory enforcement of consumer-hostile technologies that prevent all copying, legal or otherwise. In many cases, they have co-opted creator organizations to their cause. Not surprisingly, news organizations tend to view this question through the lens of corporate intermediaries. With exceptions, they frame the debate in terms University of Ottawa law professor Jeremy De Beer describes as, "the caricature of toiling creators vs. freeloading pirates."