Tomboyfriend is a collective of “nonmusicians” led by Ryan Kamstra who just happen to make some of the most emotionally relevant, lyrically poignant music you’ll find this side of just about anywhere—and that’s rare. It’s unusual to find a band so fully formed, so direct and developed in their songwriting and so absolutely heartbreaking in their delivery.

Think of them as a bittersweet Venn diagram where joy, despair, and hope all connect under an umbrella of sinister punk-rock fairytales—part Jim Carroll and Patti Smith, part Island of Misfit Toys.

Stand out tracks like “Almost Always” and “Lovesickness” have this desperate urgency that enters through the ears and just swells in your chest until you find yourself clutching your heart for no reason at all. They’re songs that make you grin uncontrollably because despite all the despair they are ultimately songs of hope and humanity that bring us increasingly closer to that point of holiness. It’s precious, brave and beautiful and seriously worth the listen.

Industry Minister Tony Clement’s iPod contains 10,452 songs, he told reporters on May 26, most of them transferred from CDs he bought. It’s a widespread practice generally known as “format shifting,” and in Canada, it’s illegal.

The minister didn’t shamefacedly admit his crime in an embarrassing gaffe; he called a press conference and announced it in order to make a point. Copyright law in Canada has lagged behind social and technological reality for years now, impotently policing an extinct world of mimeographs and cassette tapes while the rest of us got on with things. Ever ripped a CD to your computer or MP3 player like Minister Clement did? Ever taped a TV show to watch later? Had a cellphone unlocked? All are currently illegal in Canada, even as they happen every day. So on June 2, Heritage Minister James Moore introduced the Conservatives’ latest attempt to update Canadian copyright, Bill C-32.

There is some good news. The bill proposes new freedoms for people to make copies of protected material in non-commercial ways: transferring that bought-and-paid-for CD to your iPod would be legalized, as will taping a TV show to watch later. There is a new provision for artists to use copyrighted material in parody and satire. And the bill would legalize the use of protected works in many educational contexts. These new rules will finally bring the law into some sort of alignment with reality.

But there is a glaring problem: all these new freedoms are overridden by the government’s total surrender on the matter of “digital rights management,” restrictive types of software that control our use of the e-books, DVDs, or video games we purchase—what devices we may use, who we may share with, and how many times. No one would stand for a shirt that self-destructed unless worn with a certain brand of jeans, but that is the essence of DRM—the things you purchase never belong to you. Under C-32 as currently written, circumventing any digital lock would be a crime, even if the purpose were legal. With this measure, the bill legitimizes the sinister notion that large corporate interests are entitled to broad, intrusive powers to control how individuals consume culture. That idea is dangerous.

Yes, artists need legal protections to ensure they are compensated for their work. But it is not in the interest of any Canadian—including Canadian artists—to shackle artworks to technology that invades our privacy and criminalizes the normal exchange of ideas that constitutes all culture. It may still be possible to reopen the digital lock provision; a strong and unambiguous public response is the key.

In some corners of the web, piracy is a form of curation. Illustration by Matt Daley.

In the summer of 1999, a terrifying rumour began circulating on the then-young internet, gluing millions to their screens: Napster, the illegal music service, was about to be shut down. It seemed like the party with an endless soundtrack was coming to an end.

The site, which famously provided access to millions of illicitly copied songs, introduced internet piracy to the masses. Once people had a taste for a web that was a unending cultural smorgasbord, there was no going back: piracy has now become as central to web culture as celebrity news and porn.

But though the greedy rush to download anything and everything remains, a new and surprisingly widespread breed of piracy has been quietly simmering in the corners of the internet. Rather than encouraging users to grab as much pop culture as they can, these sites are about quality, not quantity. Instead of an anarchic free-for-all, they’re more like a curated exchange amongst aficionados. By most definitions, it’s still stealing, but stealing with a “Robin Hood” twist: the ultimate goal is to spread good art and challenging ideas—for free. That may be controversial, but as principles go, it’s a pretty noble one.

Today, the most common way to download copyrighted material might be a site called The Pirate Bay. It’s just one of the sites that index content scattered across the internet rather than housing it, making them harder to shut down. Every day, millions of films, songs and books are downloaded; unsurprisingly, the most commercially successful entertainment is also the most pirated. A perhaps unintended consequence of the entertainment industry’s hype for the new and popular is that it also drives those who steal from it.

But another approach to piracy has been evolving, too. Rather than an all-you-can-eat buffet, these sites are more akin to an underground dinner club for foodies. Instead of an array of popular, everyday items, one is presented with the crème de la crème of culture, whether a pristine copy of a Fellini film or that Ella Fitzgerald recording few have ever heard.

It was perhaps a music community named OiNK.cd that was the most prominent of these more rigorous sites. This go-to place for quality tunes was shut down by a legal challenge in 2007, though the site’s owner was recently cleared of charges. Nonetheless, What.cd and Waffles.fm (which, for visitors to its homepage, pretends to be a site about recipes), quickly took the place of OiNK. cd. In function, these sites work much like The Pirate Bay. In philosophy, they differ significantly. Many users take time to find and upload obscure tracks of smart, Scandinavian electronica rather than something by Beyoncé. Discussion on the sites’ forums often reflects this commitment to hidden gems, and those who share obscure or difficult works often gain credibility. Instead of mirroring the behaviour of the populist industries they seek to undercut, the sites are unapologetically elitist.

But to characterize these sites as a paradise for thieves with highbrow tastes would be to miss part of the picture. The original material might have been pirated, but these sites make members share amongst themselves. Ratios of uploads to downloads are enforced. Download every available bit of Spanish jazz without sharing in kind and you will be ruthlessly and quickly ejected. What’s more, rather than the populist grab-whatyou-can ethos of The Pirate Bay, you have a community of invested, informed people to guide your wanderings, introducing you to the innovative and new as you return the favour with your own obscure treasures.

Nor is this phenomenon limited to movies and music. AAAARG.org, a site that stores hundreds of academic articles, has electrified cultural theory geeks by finally putting some of that anti-establishment Marxist thinking into practice. When an academic publisher recently requested an article be taken down, it was met with angry and erudite responses about “the exploitative forces of capital.” To the publisher, a copyrighted work was being distributed without compensation; to the sites’ users, ideas were being shared for the greater good.

From the start, we knew the web was going to change things. What we possibly didn’t realize was, unbeknownst to many, new modes of cultural exchange were being born that replaced blind consumption with careful curation, often by simply removing the costly barriers erected around “the good stuff.” As a result, those who adhere to the letter of the law, and the spirit of copyright and ownership that underpin it, believe these sites are simply dens of theft.

But such a view is short-sighted. What these services let us see is that when the exchange of ideas, rather than the exchange of dollars, is the controlling principle, communities will form around the best and most challenging of what culture has to offer. Call me a naive idealist, but I think that’s a good thing. And when history looks back on this moment, rather than maintain the status quo, I’d rather it be known I was in Robin Hood’s band of merry thieves.

Len Dobbin, the most important audience member in Montreal's jazz scene. Illustration by Aislin.

In early fall of 1950, Len Dobbin stepped out of a listening booth on Rue Ste-Catherine in Montreal to find himself confronted by five New York jazz enthusiasts seeking potential founders for a satellite jazz appreciation society. Only 15 years old at the time, Dobbin had never met enough fans to think the project would succeed, but he agreed to give it a shot. As it turned out, there was enough interest in the city to sustain the club for almost a decade, but, more importantly for Montreal, the experience was enough to get Dobbin hooked indefinitely.

He spent the next six decades as a self-described “friend to jazz,” though his tireless enthusiasm as a journalist, photographer, promoter, researcher, and fan—almost entirely without pay—suggests an unusually demanding definition of friendship. His years post-retirement were dedicated to promoting young musicians, popularizing jazz in print and on the air, connecting musicians to one another, and bringing talent to the city. At 74, his stories and encyclopedic memory bordered on mythical: the man had photographed Miles Davis, gone clubbing with John Coltrane, earned a song dedication by baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams, and hosted some 1,500 radio shows.

When Dobbin died in July—after falling ill at his favourite Montreal jazz haunt during the world’s largest jazz festival—the city lost a great player in (surely not coincidentally) one of the healthiest jazz communities on the continent. But it is hard to tabulate Dobbin’s impact. It’s also hard to understand precisely his role: he was a trained accountant, a man who reportedly owned a jazz instrument for only a day in his life, but also, by all accounts, he was an integral part of the music scene.

Perhaps Dobbin’s passion offers us a model. As one of the first widely popularized improvisational art forms, jazz is often cited as a performance by all involved: without a score or conductor to follow, a piece relies on performers to generate its shape and depends on listeners to create its meaning, by becoming aware of the possibilities presented by each shifting cadence and making sense of how they are resolved. Never a musician, Dobbin was, perhaps, the ultimate listener: he heard potential in Montreal’s artists and denizens and did his best to realize its meaning.

Woodpigeon may very well be the biggest Canadian band you’ve never heard of — literally and figuratively. The eight-member Calgary collective’s wistful, lyrical alt-folk has been drawing capacity crowds and garnering deafening buzz in the U.K. and Europe over the past year, though homegrown listeners have been slower to discover the group’s charms.

Listen to Knock Knock by Woodpigeon

Woodpigeon's sophomore album, Treasury Library Canada. Available from Boompa Records

Mark Hamilton, a linchpin of the burgeoning Calgary indie scene, began the band while living in Edinburgh several years ago. Once back at home, he called upon a rotating roster of musical pals to flesh out his delicate melodies with strings and cherubic harmonies.

Since the release of Songbook, the band’s quietly stunning 2006 debut, Woodpigeon has amassed a devoted following, particularly in Europe. Their second full-length, Treasury Library Canada, sold out its entire initial run last fall in mere weeks before being reissued this February at home and in the U.K, where the band has received raves from the august likes of the Guardian.

“We’ve always felt deep down that people would begin to take notice, and we’ve always treated that as something that would grow naturally,” Hamilton says. “We’ve got some beautiful friends in Canada, indeed, but I’ve no problem admitting it’s definitely been a strange experience heading overseas and seeing the reaction we’re receiving over there versus here.”

Woodpigeon hopes to woo North American audiences with an upcoming volley of releases; they’ve finished their next album, Die Stadt Muzikanten, due out this fall, and have already begun work on a subsequent record, Thumbtacks + Glue, scheduled for 2010. The prolific output is in anticipation of a possible hiatus — Hamilton, who’s currently finishing up his Film Studies degree at the University of Calgary, is keen to start work on a master’s degree.

“If Joel Gibb can keep The Hidden Cameras going in Toronto while living in Berlin, and Rivers Cuomo can finish degrees off between Weezer albums, I don’t think it’s going to be much of a struggle,” Hamilton quips. “Even while I’m drowning in my thesis, there’ll be new Woodpigeon music coming out.”

Alas, we were already infected with unhappiness. We were a miserable, whiny group. The musicians got it started, with Laura Doyle, a singer-songwriter, bitterly complaining that even though songs from her new recording were featured on the thankfully defunct teen drama Dawson’s Creek, the majority of her prospective buyers downloaded her tunes for free—without buying the disc. This set off a torrent of commiseration. Apparently, songs are being traded, paintings are being scanned and slapped on covers and books are being photocopied, while artists go broke.

It’s a desperate situation, one that everyone from Rob Baker (The Tragically Hip guitarist) to André Cornellier (Montreal-based photographer) to Pat Durr (spokesperson for a national visual artists’ group) were pleased to bemoan at length. Every once in a while, Minister Copps would weigh in and commiserate. At one point, she compared culture to a loaf of bread—we don’t expect to get our bread for free now, do we?

Since I only agreed to attend for the complimentary sandwiches and the weekend stay in a luxury hotel (and didn’t bargain on cpac), I sat back and waited for someone else to elevate this discussion. But my peers were unanimous: the nasty consumer was getting one over on the increasingly desperate Canadian artist; the solution was simply a matter of tough-love copyright laws and more technologies to prevent unlicensed copying.

Quickly smoothing my uncombed hair through my fingers in an attempt to go telegenic, I found myself breaking into yet another Copps soliloquy with one of my own. It went something like: Yes, artists need to be compensated for their work. But, at the same time, the free and unfettered exchange made possible by the internet is the best way for Canadian creators to get their work out to Canada and the world. Because we live in a highly commercialized society where all the cultural distribution nodes are tightly controlled to maximize profit, the vast majority of Canadian cultural creations have extreme difficulty finding an audience. A song that does not fall into an accepted pop category and appear on an album sanctioned by a multinational label? You won’t hear it on any commercial radio station. A book by a first author published by a small press? Good luck finding it in the bookstore. A Canadian film not deemed marketable enough by the handful of distributors who control access to our movie screens? You will never have the chance to see it. So, I argued, internet conduits offering unmediated connections between cultural producers and a potential audience are actually a giant step forward, a way to take culture out of the capitalist system and return it to the community where it belongs. Finally, I said, though artists need to be compensated when their works are traded online, if I had to choose between having the opportunity to get my books out to a large, non-paying public or permanently shutting that conduit down, I would choose door number one.

My thoughts went over like stockwell in a wetsuit. Minister Copps peered at me with annoyance. The high-priced moderator—an aggressively bilingual former Miss Canada—was momentarily stunned. She quickly regained her senses and led a lengthy round of Hal-bashing that culminated with the minister patiently explaining to me that culture is like Aspirin—you don’t expect to walk into a drugstore and walk out with free Aspirin, now do you?

Only fellow writer Susan Crean stood up for me, noting that what we need in our copyright policy is balance, balance between the needs of the users and the needs of the creators. This idea, that the culture consumer also has rights and needs, that culture is not just a commodity artists make in order to gain fame and riches, was clearly a new one to most of the meeting’s attendees.

“But,” noted Baker of The Hip, “they’re stealing our music!”

Baker has little to gain from internet distribution, of course. His band’s albums are in every record store, played on every station. Laura Doyle, on the other hand, seems to be missing the point. Outside of her homebase Vancouver, where, exactly, are the Dawson faithful supposed to buy her self-released indie CD? None of the record stores I called in Toronto (including indie great Soundscapes and hmv’s giant flagship on Yonge) carried it.

This is not a commentary on the CD’s worth or Doyle’s talent; it is a reflection of the way the production side of any cultural industry colludes with the retail side. Supposedly, it is only through record stores and sanctioned online venues that the system can recoup the royalties we rightfully owe the artists. But this also means it is easy for publishers, production companies and retailers to control what we are exposed to. For every album that does gangbuster business in the Canadian record store, there are 100 just-as-good albums that are totally excluded from radio, video and store racks.

Online file-sharing threatens the large for-profit cultural industries with irrelevance—which is why the Hollywood studios and big five record companies react so virulently against it. But for an artist like Laura Doyle, it is the only way that she can reasonably expect fans to find her music.

It is not hard to imagine moving from a copyright-violating free exchange of music on the net to the complete redundancy of the entire corporate-controlled system. What is really interesting is not how many people ignore copyright to get access to free music, but what systems like Kazaa and Morpheus represent: total unfettered equal access for anyone with access to a computer. The flouting of copyright is the beginning of the end for a business model that has always depended on its ability to control what we hear, see—and find on our shelves.

And yet, I still want to make a living as a cultural creator. Can we have a system that cuts out the middleman while still finding a way to remunerate artists? I believe we can. Unfortunately, the copyright forum was never really about instituting meaningful solutions. Twenty artists were flown in from around the country for consultation, but when we got there, we discovered that the forum was scheduled to span a whole two hours. One singer-songwriter barely said a single word. Jane Siberry had a few interesting things to say about running her own record company, but she also digressed in order to make a point about the relationship between the arts and the heavens. Others, like Mad Child (a rapper from Vancouver’s Swollen Members) who, as a representative of the hip-hop set, might have had something to say about the way copyright laws restrict those who seek to borrow snippets from other songs in the spirit of creativity, seemed to think that the gathering was a perfunctory PR stop. “Canada’s a great country,” Mad Child told the gathering. “We feel really supported.”

Buoyed by such sentiments, the two hours flew by without any talk of solutions. An opportunity lost? Well, at the next night’s official government Juno party attended by 1,000 or so bureaucrats rubbernecking absent celebs (all at private parties with their record company pals), the minister’s assistant pulled me aside and invited me to put my comments down on paper.

So here they are.