Stop Feeding the Dinosaurs

What Canada needs most of all is digital policy that actually drives disruption. Policy that maximizes the creative and innovative potential of any Canadian not just legacy Big Content.

Let's make Canada a nation of creators, not a nation of consumers. Let's make digital policy and copyright policy that maximizes the distribution potential of the internet rather than blocking, throttling or criminalizing the tubes at the behest of walking–dead distribution models.

Quoting David Eaves:

"Indeed, case in point was listening to managers of the Government of Canada's multimedia fund share how, to get funding a creator would need to partner with a traditional broadcaster. To be clear, if you want to kill content, give it to a broadcaster, they'll play it once or twice, then put it in a vault and one will ever see it again. Furthermore, a broadcaster has all the infrastructure, processes and overhead that makes them unworkable and unprofitable in the online era. Why saddle someone new with all this? Ultimately this is a program designed to create failures and worse, pollute the minds of emerging multimedia artists with all sorts of broadcast baggage. All in the belief that it will help bridge the transition. It won't.

The ugly truth is that just like the big horse buggy makers didn't survive the transition to the automobile, or that many of the creators of large complex mainframe computers didn't survive the arrival of the personal computer, our traditional media environment is loaded with the walking dead. Letting them control the conversation, influence policy and shape the agenda is akin to asking horse drawn carriage makers write the rules for the automobile era. But this is exactly what we are doing. The copyright law, the pillar of this next economy, is being written not by the PMO, but by the losers of the last economy. Expect it to slow our development down dramatically."