Competition and Investment. Copyrights as they are are completely anticompetitive. They grant a legislated monopoly on the company or individual who created the work or who has bought the work.

Digital Rights Management whether it is region encoding on a DVD, or software locks that prevent content from playing on a competitor's device should be illegal.

Since a lot of people like the car analogy imagine if when you bought a car the car company dictated you could only drive on certain roads and they would put restrictions preventing you from say leaving the city without paying extra for a car that gives you permission to go one town over. This is what the current situation is for digital media. Not only is such technology more expensive to implement than one that allows you unlimited use of your purchase; this would be done solely to increase the profits of the car companies. This would provide absuletely no value to customers.

The law should ensure that everyone has full access to use the media they buy as they see fit whether it's to install one time or one hundred times. Recently Electronic Arts has released a game Spore which required permission from the Company to install it on more than 3 computers or more than 3 times. It forced authentication with their servers calling home to make sure you were not stealing their software. Fair use laws should do everything to prevent these types of exploitative practices.

Copyright laws should prevent commercial counterfitting and use for a LIMITED period of time so that new ideas could be implemented and used to the benefit of all.

To foster competition and investment companies should be forced to prove use of a copyright and or patent in order to be allowed to persue damages for infringement thus preventing copyright and patent trolls who do nothing but make money suing creative industries.

I would like to submit my submission to the 2003 consultation on the Competition Act as part of this consultation. Since I recommended that the Competition Bureau become involved in Copyright consultations, I believe that this also suggests that those reviewing copyright should be in contact with the Competition Bureau.

http://www.flora.ca/competition2003/

This was a competition policy focused submission that was a follow-up to my submission to the Section&nbasp;92 review of the copyright act.

http://www.flora.ca/copyright2003/

The key competition issue is legal protection for so-called "technical protection measures" claimed to help copyright. This is part of the policy laundered 1996 WIPO treaties which some politicians believe we should be ratifying in Canada.

The digital locks on content are a form of "tied selling" between the locked content and "authorized" brands of information technology. The digital locks on our devices (also implicated by DMCA style anti-circumvention laws) create lock-down such the owner of the device can not make software and other choices, causing considerable competition problems.

Understanding the two locks: http://www.flora.ca/documents/digital-ownership.shtml and http://www.digital-copyright.ca/petition/ict/

Neither lock should be legalized (IE: should be considered violations of competition and other laws such as property law), and should definitely not be legally protected under copyright or other law.

Look at all the industry built AROUND the car industry: Parts, repair shops, part retailers, home repair tools, paint shops, stereo installers, "upgrades", etc…
Repair shops COMPETE for business by repairing better/cheaper and the market decides. Entire industries and thousands of jobs (investment) are created because we OWN our cars and can repair and improve them ourselves WITHOUT the original creator's permission.

Now, Imagine if our cars could be locked down the way DRM locks down songs/books. You couldn't change your oil/tires/stereo in your home garage and we'd all be subject to the whims of the "authorized repairman" where monopoly would drive up the price, reduce competition and reduce the quality of service. Independent mechanics would go out of business, and home garage owners would be sued for Copyright Infringement when they try to "circumvent a bolt" to change their own tires.

We need to allow people to tinker, copy and play with the media/cars they bought, and watch the industries that will rise up from a fair but balanced copyright law that allows personal fair use. We should not allow the people who made the CD/car to forever require me to go back over and over every time there's a new ipod/tire technology I want to try.