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I think tonight may have changed my life.

It's not that I wasn't heading in this direction before. I've spent almost half my life hovering eagerly at the edges of activist groups and artist communities. I've done boycotting and lobbying and fund-raising in my own small ways, and I've certainly done my share of passionate writing. But tonight crystalized something for me that was hazy before: I am not really at the edge of that community I've been so hungry for. I'm there. I am a student and worker in the publishing industry. I write. I blog. I'm a conscious consumer. I create things. And I believe in all of it.

Tonight I attended a free lecture given by Cory Doctorow at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The subject was copyright. It's something that's relevant to my program, but hardly engrossing - you would think.

And you would be wrong.

The topic of copyright law - of controlling who can do what with whose intellectual property - is a major issue in our society right now. I am not a betting person, but I will bet that you (yes, you!) have talked about it lately. Have you argued about downloading music recently? Asked around for the best free (read: pirated) version of a program on the internet? Made pessimistic remarks about the future of print media? That's copyright.

Why am I bringing this up here? I can hear you thinking, "Hey, Erin! You promised us crafts, not essays! We indulged your little poetry whim, but this?"

Ah, but this. This is important to you, too, dear reader. You are reading a blog - my words and images, my intellectual property - hosted on a platform that controls none of its content, delivered to you instantly, free of charge. By most publishing standards, that's practically subversive. It's certainly risky; how will I protect my work? What if someone appropriates last week's exquisite limerick and uses it as his own? Without the heft and legal team of a major publisher behind me, how can I sue him for millions of dollars? Why would I ever expose my work on a platform that has no digital lock to prevent it from being copied???

Well, aside from the fact that such locks are no more than fun puzzles for hackers to solve, it's because I believe in art that is not controlled by major companies. And that is the unspoken heart of the copyright debate right now. Governments are allowing more and more controls on the platforms that let us view and listen to media. Some of these controls are locks that will shut our systems down if we copy a file we haven't paid for. Some spy on our digital activities. Many make it impossible for us to access the music, text or other media we paid for on another company's platform. The rhetoric says that these measures protect artists and make sure they get paid for their work. I certainly believe in that. But mainly these measures protect the interests of the companies that are quickly buying out every other means we have of accessing these works. And this doesn't only trap consumers into dealing exclusively with those companies; it traps the artists as well, because they can't reach their audience through anyone else. They have to take whatever terms the companies will give them.

Right now in Canada Bill C-32 is causing a lot of fuss. It proposes a change to the copyright act that would make it illegal for consumers to copy any music file they bought, even for reasons (like backing it up) that are actually legal (I'm not a lawyer and I haven't gotten very far in my copyright course, so please excuse my simplification of a complicated issue). The bill was already defeated once, but it is going to be re-introduced. This time around, the process will not include any public consultation.

I have no delusions that every one of you is going to jump up from your computer and start lobbying your local member of parliament about Bill C-32. I don't know about your downloading habits, or whether or not you buy a lot of books. But I am reasonably sure that every one of you is interested in independent forms of expression, and in hearing the voice of the little guy, and in the act of creation. If not, what are you doing on the small-time creativity blog of a poet-dreamer college student? So I'm going to ask you to think about this. That's not much to ask, right? Think, and be aware, and make your choices based on that awareness. Because scary things can happen if someone decides they can control a society's access to art and media.

If you're at all interested in copyright and the alternatives to our current system, check out the Creative Commons, a licensing system that lets creators share their work but keep the credit. If you want to listen to the podcast of tonight's Cory Doctorow talk, I'll post a link as soon as it's available.

Just think.