Copyright Blog Entry Becomes Headline News

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The man at the heart of the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook page created a media storm last month with comments claiming that the Harper government was within weeks of releasing a new copyright bill.

Michael Geist and his facebook properties came to public prominence in 2007 with his fight against the government's planned copyright reform and bill C60, which was said to be a close copy of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

In May, Geist posted comments on his blog that cited unnamed sources, saying that the government was close to releasing details of a new copyright bill, which he called "the most anti-consumer copyright bill in Canadian history."

Within hours, the post generated news items across traditional and online media - Geist catalogued in the following day's blog entry - all of it generating hundreds of comments and much of it pointing back to Geist's Facebook pages.

The public interest and debate in issues around copyright is to be commented, to be sure. Unfortunately, most of the noise comes from consumer advocate camps and those that believe getting free things off the internet is their right, making a discussion about creators' rights difficult.

In this recent move, Geist has shown how adept he is at getting in front of the story - to some extent manufacturing a story - and has successfully enlisted the mainstream media in his quest to build a facebook army in advance for the next round in this battle.

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