Jason Prini .com

Monsanto has been suing Canadian Farmers for years now. You see the wind, insects and birds all naturally spread plant genetics. Some of Mosanto’s patented genetics (what kind of dystopian world do we live in where genes can be patented?) have naturally spread to non-Monsanto farms and so the corporation is looking to collect on those “losses”. This is a good example of where tighter copyright laws might very well take us.

Just like Mosanto pays legions of lawyers and lobbyists to try and shape public opinion that they have a right to profit from natural process, the entertainment industry is doing everything it can to ensure that it has the control to profit from the natural sharing of culture.

You can do something. Write to Jim Prentice, Steven Harper and your local MP. Tell them that culture is public domain and you don’t want to hand over more control of it to corporations.

Of course my biggest question of copyright debate is this:

Why is the debate almost completely about controlling data that must be shared to work (like music), and almost not at all about data that MUST be controlled at all cost (like my social insurance number).

If you’re looking for a review of how we got where we are, click on to watch Larry Lessig’s BRILLIANT corruption lecture: Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday China announced that it will be diverting much of it’s $1.4 trillion American dollar reserve into more stable currencies “such as the Euro or Canadian dollar“.

Peter Chilf, of Euro Pacific Capital sees the credit meltdown in the US as the beginning of a major overhaul of the American economy.

Much of Canada’s economy is build on “free” trade with the US. But the US seems to becoming more protectionist, and if their economy takes the nose-dive more and more people are predicting, where will that leave us?

I think we need a free trade agreement with the European Union. The EU is a market of nearly 500 million people (50% larger than the us), and their economies are of similar size (US GDP ~ $14T, EU GDP ~ $14.5T).

Canada has been slowly working on more trade with the European Union, but it seems to have stagnated.

While the EU economy is much less consumption driven than the US, the EU populations use less credit, which makes it seem like a much more sustainable trading partner to me. Canada has domestic experience dealing with multilingual markets, and if the north passage opens up, it could make for cheaper shipping to the EU.

I’m not saying cut off trade with the US. We should revisit NAFTA and see if we can’t make it better for everyone, and we should pursue more trade with South America. If the recent oil find in Brazil is as big as some predict, we could have a hungry Portuguese “Saudi-Arabia” down there looking to spend petro-dollars.

I subscribed to a new video feed in Miro last night and had my mind blown. The following video (mostly audio, as it’s a good PowerPoint presentation) stretched my understanding of the problem of money that’s threatening society in our current time.

[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2171306322262202538&hl=en[/googlevideo]

Larry Lessig is a brilliant lawyer, that has a real gift concisely telling the story of hugely complex problems that seem to be changing every hour.