It seems that doing business online is getting harder with every passing month in this country. This is not good. I’m sure most Canadians have heard of this, but I’d thought I’d bring it up again for good measure.
Here’s Rick Mercer on the absurdity of a law proposed under Vic Towes, who also alleges we support child pronographers. ಠ_ಠ
If you do anything on the internet and live in Canada you should be concerned about this Bill C-30.
The Conservatives in Ottawa are trying to damage our economy again by destroying the internet. You know about SOPA and the insane propositions in the USA, but now those same media interests are doing the same pathetic actions up here. If you haven’t heard about Bill C-11 and live in Canada please read on!
Massive media conglomerates are lobbying the government to create shadowy legislation: an Internet lock-down, where Internet users are cut off for no good reason, where vast swaths of the Internet are removed or hidden from view, and where users are locked out of their own services.
A similar scheme in the US led to a huge public outcry forcing Big Media lobbyists to back off from their plan to impose the now-infamous SOPA and PIPA1 legislation.
Now, those lobbyists are turning to Canada through legislation like Bill C-11 and trade agreements called ACTA2 and TPP3. Internet law expert Michael Geist recently revealed that behind-the-scenes, Big Media is pushing for powers that include website blocking4, Internet termination for people that threaten their business interests5, and huge threats for sites that host user-generated content (like YouTube)6 in addition to the digital locks7 already in the Bill.
Taken together, these policies would fundamentally change the Internet, severely limit free expression, and hogtie innovators. This approach is backwards: it suffocates online choice and it’s patently unfair.
Politicians and policymakers have an opportunity to put Canada on the map as a leader in Internet openness and affordability. But they have to know that we’re behind them if they stand up to megacorporate lobbyists.
Tell the Prime Minister and the Industry Minister to say no to the Internet lockdown. →
To put things in a larger, global, context take a look at ACTA.
Jesse Brown has published an article that has enraged the entire Canadian games industry – and rightly so! Brown wrote a piece called Grand theft tax break that is based off of a New York Times article on tax breaks in the USA for the video game industry there.
Brown’s piece ignores a lot of the great stuff that has come out of the video game industry here in Canada. Torontoist has a really good rebuttal to Brown that among other things points out how Toronto had an indie scene before Ubisoft came to town:
In Toronto, tax incentives make sense; our local industry is fledgling relative to those in Vancouver and Montreal. In fact, Ontario has smartly focused on supporting the industry here with tax breaks and grants and has tangible results to show for it: Toronto is now a rising star in the games world. However, what convinced Ontario to invest? It’d be hard to argue that the success of Vancouver and Montreal wasn’t a major factor. So, while Brown would like a Canadian industry of our “own,” the presence of one was undoubtedly catalyzed by the draw of foreign corporations, which brought along their knowledgebase and visibility.
Brown also called game developers slobs (essentially) which is just insulting and has no merit. Village Gamer has a good response to that:
These people – to whom Mr. Brown referred to as “code monkeys” and “grunts” are my friends, and it is these “grunts” who help to bring entire worlds to life, whether it is in an adventure – and sneakily educational – game like Assassin’s Creed, or an educational game that is sneakily fun like those coming out of Vivity Labs’ Fit Brains – all of them are built on top of a foundation built from computer code. Even the military relies on “grunts” to get things done, and done well, Mr. Brown.
What’s more is that Brown assumes that people who are working in the games industry now will inevitably lose their jobs when tax breaks get better elsewhere. I don’t think that’s true. In manufacturing, jobs do go elsewhere (look at NAFTA), but when it comes to the culture industry we can also create more culture no matter how many companies are here (unlike cars).
A lot of the companies that have produced best-selling games here have gotten a helping hand from the government but they have also helped the industry throughout Canada by bringing and attracting talent. People who wanted to get into game production use to leave the country but now, thanks to the tax incentives companies are coming here to access that talent.
If the big companies leave we’ll still have talent that can produce top-quality content because they’ll have the know-how and the connections to it.
The game industry is helping to retain (and attract) culture-producing people to Canada and that’s good for everyone.
For many start-ups in Canada being acquired by a larger company is a sound exit strategy, however that process can be complicated by ownership structures. Entrepreneur Carl Mercier has an excellent blog post on how to structure your Canadian company to be easily acquired by an American company. It seems almost too simple to believe.
Karabunga owned all the IP, the Defensio name, the trademarks, the code and the servers (in our case, EC2). Karabunga owned and controlled all the value.
QC-inc was a simple consulting firm that had only one client: Karabunga. Our employees, office, dev computers, ping-pong table and our infamous Dev1 development server all belonged to QC-inc. The idea is to keep both companies as independent as possible. If QC-inc went out of business for whatever reason, it would not have impacted Karabunga in any way (aside from losing all the employees). QC-inc also obeyed Quebec’s French-language laws such as Bill 101. Hopefully you don’t have that problem where you live.
Karabunga is the company we sold to Websense and the employees became Websense employees. I later dismantled QC-inc since it lost its only client and no longer had a purpose.
Read the full rundown on being a Canadian company incorporating in the states.
New Games on the App Store