October 2009

Monthly Archive

Copyright and the test of time

Posted by on 31 Oct 2009 | Tagged as: Canada, culture, history, politics

During July-Sept 2009, the Government of Canada held public copyright consultations, with an eye to writing new copyright law. They asked for submissions addressing five topics.  Here’s one of my submissions, on the “test of time“. It’s hard to tell what will become of these consultations, because the government may fall (again) before Parliament gets a chance to pass a new bill. My submission did eventually show up on the official submissions page, but I still want to publish it for the record on my own blog.  I have two more submissions, one on “Copyright and you (me)” which I published last month, and one which I’ll dribble out in the coming days.

Q: Based on Canadian values and interests, how should copyright changes be made in order to withstand the test of time?

A: The largest single dynamic is the change in delivery of cultural works from physical containers (paper books, CD disks, celluloid film) to digital information (ebooks, music files, computer networks).

Physical containers are:

  1. either immediately accessible by humans (books), or accessible via limited machines which did not copy the container.
  2. expensive to duplicate, and expensive to transport. Continue Reading »

“Going live: adding a staging server to your Joomla development process” at Vancouver Joomla User Group

Posted by on 08 Oct 2009 | Tagged as: CMS, Joomla, meetings and conferences, Vancouver

A Vancouver Joomla User Group started up recently. We’re experimenting with what format will serve us well. For this month’s meeting, I’ll give a talk about staging servers (details below) and we’ll have plenty of time for networking and Q&A. I there there’s lots of room for more Joomla content in this town. Here‘s the coordinates:

Going live: adding a staging server to your Joomla development process

Thursday, 8. October 2009, 18:30-20:30hAt The Network Hub, 422 Richards Street, 3rd floor, Vancouver, BC V6B 2Z3. tel +1 604 767 8778.

A monthly meeting of the Vancouver Joomla User Group. Admission free. All people interested in learning more about the Joomla! content management system, and helping others learn more, are welcome.

Continue Reading »