OVER THE EDGE
A Apdl Sth-September 10th, 2008

Permit, if you will, me to get a little bit personal. Because
not only is this the last issue of the semester, it’s my last se-
mester—period. For the first in over fifteen years, I have no
plans to return to school within a year. I am about to officially
enter this thing they call “the real world.” I will also no longer
qualify for student discounts, which is a real shame, because I
never really took advantage of them. I guess you never know
what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. Joni Mitchell was right.

Which is sort of what I’m going to be talking about in this,

_ ty penultimate column as an undergrad student.

If you are from Prince George or a city like it you have prob-
ably, at some time or another, been confronted with the “can’t
wait to get out” syndrome. This is when somebody says,
“Man, I can’t wait to get out of this city,” or “I gotta get out of
this city,” or “I’ll bet you can’t wait to get out of this city.” Ap-
proaching graduation, I have been told this last one more than
once, but having been “out of this city” before and with plans
to be “out of the city” again in the near future, and with job
applications going out to various parts of the country, I have to
say it doesn’t really apply. I like it here. It’s my home. And the
idea of leaving, permanently, isn’t something that strikes me
as particularly exciting.

I don’t know if that would have been the case if, upon com-
pleting high school, I was to have gone off to UBC or U of A
or McGill. If I had done that, I would have spent the last five
yeats building a life in some other city, working there, making
friends, getting involved. But I didn’t do that. I did it here. And
now I want to stay.

Statistically speaking, I’m not that unusual. The BC Univer-
sity President’s Council of British Columbia keeps track of
these sorts of things, and they have found that a full 50% of
UNEC graduates are living and working in northern BC two
years after leaving school. Numbers are similar for other uni-
versities in the province—where you study drastically affects
where you settle down. In the Nordic countries they have used
universities as part of a greater strategic plan to settle and de-
velop the north. Having built full universities with profession-
al schools in engineering, law, medicine, and the like, northern
regions of Finland, Norway, and Sweden are developing into
self-sufficient units. Anywhere from 50% to 80% of students
who study in these regions stay in these regions, and as a result
they have no shortage of doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs, or

‘Opinions _

artists. This is made all the more impressive when one realizes
that these regions are very similar—economically, geograph-
ically, and demographically—to northern BC. There’s no rea-
son the same thing can’t happen up here.

For some time now, I’ve been under the impression that
a city is only as good as the people-who are in it. They key
to getting what you want out of some place isn’t to wait for
someone else to do it—it’s to do it yourself. Any “cool” city
didn’t just start out that way—people made them that way by
starting bands and writing books and shopping at local busi-
nesses. Everyplace in North America—heck, everyplace in
the world—started out as a small resource town. Even Ren-
aissance-era Rome had a population roughly the same size as
modern-day Prince George, and people are still talking about
it today..

Fortunately, the DIY attitude seems to be nis on locally..
Obviously, it existed for some time before or UNBC wouldn’t
be here. If you want to get an idea of how a few motivated and
mobilized people can transform a community, I highly suggest
you read “UNBC- A Northern Crusade” by Charles J. McCaf-
frey. If you never knew Prince George before the 1990s, it’s
enlightening to see how many people in charge—politicians
and the like—believed that people north of Kamloops had no
interest in post-secondary education. But a small yet mobil-
ized group recognized the transformational effect a university
could have on northern BC and, weil, here we all are.

But big projects like UNBC, which operate on a macro
level, need to be accompanied by a micro level of activity if
they’re going to work. But that’s the beauty of living up here
right now—even something small can have a big effect. Take
Meow Records, for example. If a new record store opens up
in Toronto or Vancouver, it’s not that big of a deal—record
stores there are kind of a given. But Bryndis Ogmudsdon, the
owner, decided to take a risk and open it yp in a mill town
with a downtown that’s been dying for over forty years. Now,
thanks to her efforts and the efforts of a loyal customer base,
Prince George can proudly boast that it’s downtown has one of
the top twenty record stores in Canada (and maybe higher) ac-
cording to the results at radio3.cbc.ca. Why? Because there’s a
group of people in this city who appreciate Meow’s presence
and its other projects (Rollergirls, releasing local bands on the
Meow Records label) to change the city. They realize that if

you want a nice downtown, you have to support the stores that
open there, which encourages others to open up, which brings
more people downtown, and so on. Going downtown today,
with places like Pizza Rico’s and Homework and Meow is
a drastically different experience than it was even five years
ago, all because of decisions people have made to invest in
the city, be it by opening an independent restaurant or simply
eating at one.

And that’s why I’m not so keen on leaving. While I’m sure
it’s fine living in bigger, most established centers, I’m not sure
they can give me the same sense of excitement that being in
Prince George right now can. It’s the difference between being
in Liverpool circa 1961 and London at the same time. Sure,
London is always going to get more attention, but there was
a musical revolution underway in the backwater port town of
Liverpool. It’s great that bigger cities have established them-
selves, but at the same time it’s hard to get the impression that
you’re really going to contribute anything.

A publication like Over the Edge, whatever it’s shortcom-
ings, is still the only one of its kind up here. If you want to
tead about bands out of Vancouver you’ve got the Georgia
Strait, you’ve got thetyee.ca, you’ve got Breath of Fresh Mint
magazine, you’ve got no limit of options. Here, if you’re writ-
ing about the local bands, you’re the only person doing it.
And with groups like the Arbitrarys and Jeremy Stewart and
the Rest set for a cross-Canada tour this summer, it’s nice to
think that Over the Edge was the first publication to give them
any attention. Same with places like Pizza Rico’s and Meow,
which have been OTE-endorsed from the time they opened—
writing about them may be a small role, but if it made a few
more people try them out, then it made a difference.

And so, as I approach the end of my run here, I find my-
self wanting more. There’s so much going on in this-city once
you start digging around, and it’s been impossible to tell every
story that I’ve come across or to see every show that I wanted
to see. My hope is that I’ll get the chance again one day, but in
the meantime I’m just going to encourage you to get out there
and get involved. Don’t sit around wishing Prince George—or
wherever you are—was different, MAKE it different. Start a
“zine or start a website or buy local or whatever. If this city
sucks, it’s your own damn fault for not making it better. Now

go.

Sony BMG Sued and Raided for Software
Piracy / “Attempted Copyright Infringement’

JEREMY JOHNSON

Stare WRiteER

_ In my nearly three years of journalism in
the field of copyright and technology as well
as privacy and technology, it never ceases to
amaze me how radical things can get. I keep
setting the bar lower and lower for what the
major US record labels can actually get away
with. I mean, how’s this for a thought: go-
ing from an innocent until proven guilty to a
guilty until proven innocent in a formal court
setting? I’m sure the more skeptical of you
would probably wonder what is exactly new

with that. Well, in the copyright debate, this.

whole way of thinking was put into the lime-
light rather recently.

In the case of Elektra v. Barker in New
York, the whole concept of the “Attempted
copyright infringement” theory is being put to
the test in court. In essence, what if you never
actually infringed copyright? What if you put
a copyrighted song in a share point on your

computer, but no one actually downloaded it?

Would that constitute copyright infringement,
enabling major record labels to sue you?
That’s pretty much what the record labels

are hoping for. Why this concerns me is the
fact that it would require even less evidence
to successfully sue someone — all this during
a time when the Conservative government is
looking to mirror US style copyright laws. So
the new development is essentially that the
Electronic Frontier Foundation among a host
of other civil rights groups argued that it does
not constitute copyright infringement for sim-
ply putting a song on a shared directory — de-
manding that the case be dismissed on those
grounds. The judge looked at the arguments
and basically told the record labels to make a
few cosmetic revisions to the complaint and
bring them back in 30 days so the case can
proceed. While the case doesn’t make spe-
cific mention to the “Attempted Copyright in-
fringement” term, to my knowledge, it pretty
much amounts to it. In my mind, apparently
evidence is no longer needed to convict some-
one these days. Now, imagine how this could
be applied in other cases that may not specif-
ically be related to copyright. Yeah, exactly.
To add another sick and twisted turn-to the
whole situation today, I thought I’d add in the
other (as of this writing) breaking news story.

Sony BMG, a major record label that is in-

volved in trying to make it illegal for even
thinking about infringing on copyright was
recently busted for software piracy in France.
Yup, same company that put rootkits on
people’s computers to prevent copyright in-
fringement, exposing millions to malware
through their music albums was caught in one
of the biggest hypocrisy stories this year so
far. :

PointDev, a software developer was con-
tacted by Sony BMG IT department person-
nel for technical assistance. Pretty straight
forward and normal so far. The technical as-
sistance person requested the registration key
and the IT guy, probably clueless as to what
would happen next, passed it along, The tech-
nical support quickly discovered that the soft-
ware being used by Sony BMG was pirated.
In January this year, they got a bailiff to raid
one of the premises of Sony BMG and found
the pirated software sitting on four of their
servers. Obviously, this is how a 6 person
crew (staff count of the company) got Point-
Dev very well known throughout the internet
in a big hurry. They are currently saying that
they want to make Sony BMG an example for
their anti-piracy effort. Ouch, ouch, OUCH.

Sony is currently doing everything they can
to not say anything about the story, probably
hoping it will eventually go away. Thousands
on the internet responded to the story saying,
“Karma!!!” I honestly don’t know where this
story will go from here, but the 300,000 euro
per infringement is a slap on the wrist for such
a large company that I can’t tell.

I suppose, this brings me back to the courts
in the US. When you have a large company
get a slap on the wrist for doing the very thing
they swore to abolish, yet they can pretty
much, without effort, ruin the lives of tens
of thousands of people by basically mugging
civilians over copyright, I find myself ask-
ing, exactly who do the courts, the laws, the
government serve these days anyway? To me,
when I took at the two cases, all I see is, “It’s
immoral and wrong when you commit copy-
right infringement, but when we do it, that’s
a whole other story!” The skeptic in me is
saying, “Not to worry, the US will eventually
amend the line to say, “by the corporation, for
the corporation, to the corporation.’” Justice
be damned, there’s money to be made here.

we