Julianna Yau’s blog

The Media Law Resource Center, Stanford Publishing Courses and Stanford Law School Center for Internet & Society are hosting Legal Frontiers in Digital Media, a conference on the emerging legal issues surrounding digital publishing and content distribution.

The conference is on May 15 and 16, 2008 at Stanford.

Despite the fact that the opposition motion to Bill C-10 was voted down in response to the Senate Liberals’ intent to block the Income Tax Act from being used as a censorship enabler, the Banking Committee resumes study of Bill C-10 amidst public concerns about censorship.

CARFAC Ontario has published their press release on C-10, as well as a form letter which can be used to send to members of parliament. The Toronto International Film Festival Group has also published a press release on C-10. The Facebook group Keep your censoring hands off of Canadian film and TV! No to Bill C-10! has 29,360 members as of the writing of this post.

Disclaimer: this isn’t a paid post, although I am happy to be reimbursed by after the fact…

For the past year, I have been trying to sell my first-generation Nomad Jukebox Zen. Because it uses a hard drive (instead of flash memory) and is considered humongous by today’s standards (it’s about the size of a Walkman), no one would take it from me.

Through one of the 20+ blogs to which I’m subscribed, I discovered SecondRotation. I must admit I was skeptical about it at first, mainly because it seemed too good to be true. It was offering me $50US for the Zen, which was more than I expected to get from it (after posting it with no responses on Kijiji and Craigslist over several months). Subtract the$13 I paid for shipping, and it’s still a good deal.

After going through their price estimate system (which was very straightforward) and selecting my payment option (cheque or PayPal; I opted for PayPal), I printed a shipping label and received an auto-confirmation by email.

The confirmation email had a very puzzling “Expires On” date, which was five calendar days from the issue date.  I didn’t expect the package to be delivered to them by the expiration date, but sent it anyway. I also contacted SecondRotation through their website to ask about the expiration date, but have yet to hear anything back from them. That was the only blip in the communication process.

I received an email about a-week-and-a-half later, indicating that they had received the Zen and would be inspecting it to ensure it matches the description I provided. Oddly enough, the tracking number from Canada Post still doesn’t reflect that the package has been delivered.

Twenty minutes later, I received an email from SecondRotation saying that they had completed the inspection and would be issuing my money in 5-10 business days. That was on a Friday.

The following Thursday, I received two emais from SecondRotation, notifying me that they had sent the money to my PayPal account. I logged into PayPal, and confirmed the money was received.

Total time elapsed: 2-and-a-half weeks, including a 1-and-a-half week shipment time across the border.

Aside from the absence of free shipping for Canada, their main caveat is they aren’t accepting everything yet. I have a basic Creative webcam I want to unload, and although they accept Creative webcams, they don’t accept the model I have. They also accept many cell phone models, but seemingly only models sold in the US.

Now if only they would take my laserdisc player.