According to the CBC site

Government ministries are regularly failing to meet their own time limit of 30 business days to respond to information requests, Loukidelis said in Victoria.  The average response time reached 51 business days for general information, Loukidelis said.

While it is good news that fewer requests are being denied outright, it’s pretty poor that the government can’t meet it’s own timelines.

Originally posted at The Information Policy Blog » tara.

A friend told me about Ellen Lupton’s design books and website.  I immediately requested 6 of her books through the public library. I’m especially excited to read Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students and D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself.

The free font manifesto on Lupton’s site caught my eye.  There are some handsome fonts with names like Linux Libertine, Freefont, and Ubuntu.  The manifesto sets out that a free font is has been licensed to be free and can be altered to form a new font (sound familiar?) and has been made available beyond a group of friends or buyers of a software package or operating system.  There is a short discussion on if all fonts should be free.  The manifesto points out that typeface design in a profession and business and that if all fonts were free these people would be out of a job.  The manifesto continues:

Most typefaces created in the free font movement are designed to serve relatively small or underserved linguistic communities. They have an explicit social purpose, and they are intended to offer the world not a luxurious outpouring of typographic variation but rather the basics for maintaining literacy and communication within a society.

Originally posted at The Information Policy Blog » tara.

Here’s some of the proposed penalties included in Bill C-61, the bill that contains proposed changes to Canadian copyright law:

• $500 per downloaded song
• No Fair Use rights for remix culture
• $20,000 for uploading content (like on Youtube)

If you too are a copyright criminal take your picture with this photo plate and upload it to the Open Source Cinema site. You could also include the photo with a letter to your MP saying this bill sucks.

Originally posted at The Information Policy Blog » tara.

Photo credit: teemow on Flickr

Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic has set up a wiki listing legitimate uses of peer to peer file sharing.

Cory Doctorow  on Boing Boing writes:

Alarmed that Bell Canada is throttling and degrading P2P traffic, David Fewer and some of his friends have created a wiki to list “all of the legitimate things that P2P can and is doing. Kind of a one stop shop for evidence of how this technology has the capacity to change the world.” The idea is that this can be used in regulatory proceedings and other policy fora to establish the legitimacy of P2P. They want your input!

Originally posted at The Information Policy Blog » tara.

The BC Civil Liberties Association is holding a free public event on RFID titled What’s the frequency Kenneth? on Thursday, May 15, 2008 7:30 pm at the Vancouver Public Library in the Alma VanDusen and Peter Kay Rooms Here’s a pdf of the poster.There was also an informative link on Boingboing about how to kill/block an RFID chip.

Originally posted at The Information Policy Blog » tara.