Don't do it for us. Do it for Canada.

The backdrop here is Bill C-32, an Act to amend the Canadian Copyright Act. The bill would criminalise the act of circumventing, or making available to the public the ability to circumvent, digital rights management software locks. In short, the bill is basically designed to strengthen property rights over intellectual property.

Contrary to what many may think, the economic argument for these laws is not as strong as one might imagine. For those interested in understanding why, please refer to this fine blog by Michele Boldrin and David Levine: Against Monopoly. In Canada, we have Michael Geist offering good arguments against certain aspects of C-32.

But the purpose of this post is not to debate C-32. What I want to show you is this: a letter recently published in a major Canadian newspaper, written on behalf of a group of "concerned Canadian authors." Despite C-32's attempt to strengthen copyright law, these authors evidently do not think it goes far enough. The reason for this is because C-32 may allow for some degree of fair use. (For related commentary, see Meera Nair's interesting blog: Fair Duty).

Fair use. Oh, the horror. Oh, the hypocrisy. (They evidently have zero concept of how their own creative works have been built on the shoulders of free social capital.)

Anyway, take a look at the letter. Who did they employ to write it? I mean, it's one thing to state one's objections to a pending legislation; I have no problem with this. But the tone...the language...my goodness...it reads as if it were written by a petulant child (and this is perhaps giving them too much credit, as I think the maturity level in most children exceeds that which is displayed in this letter).

But what really got me was the concluding statement.

Pathetic. Truly pathetic.