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COPYRIGHT REFORM PROCESS
SUBMISSIONS RECEIVED REGARDING THE CONSULTATION PAPERS
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Submission from Vlad Sedach received on July 27, 2001 9:07 AM via e-mail
Subject: Consultation paper on Digital Copyright Issues Comments
Hello,
I am a creative internet professional living in Alberta, and having reviewed
the above titled paper as well as reading several other articles on your
perspective of the issue, I wish to add my voice to the petitioning of
others for fair intellectual property laws.
I am aware that the 1997 WIPO treaty requires the participants to graft laws to "provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures" - but as others have stated, the United States' DMCA approach of outlawing the creation and possession of devices designed to do the aforementioned act harms fair-use rights of consumers and propagates industry monopoly over content and its delivery.
An excellent example of the damage already caused by such measures can be seen in the widely publicized arrest of Jon Johansen, the author of DeCSS, at the request of the Motion Picture Association of America. DVD discs are encoded with the CSS (Content Scrambling System), a proprietary measure developed by the film distribution industry. This system is utilized to play back DVD disks while preventing "unauthorized" copying of any kind - in the US, the Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios case (the Betamax case), established that copying of film and video content for personal use was covered by fair use copyright laws. The means of decrypting the system to play back DVD discs can only be licensed through the members of the MPAA, effectively monopolizing the distribution and viewing of content to that organization. DeCSS was created by Jon Johansen through reverse engineering with the purpose of eventually making an open-source, royalty free DVD player for personal computers, ending the MPAA's artificial monopoly over the viewing of legitimately purchased DVD disks by consumers. At the moment, the CSS scheme is being reviewed by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission for restricting competition by "zoning" disks (restricting the viewing of the content to playback equipment sold in a particular region), and by the European Union's competition commissioner for price fixing facilitated by the zoning system.
Devices and techniques that employ reverse-engineering and circumvent protection schemes should not be made illegal, as the past has witnessed them to be effective tools in preventing artificial monopolies and helping consumer rights. You may not know this, but the personal computer on which you are probably reading this right now could not have been made possible without the reverse-engineering of the IBM PC BIOS by Phoenix Technologies in the mid 80s, and the subsequent sale of compatible components by them and other firms, creating the "clone PC" market, which even to this day prevents the stagnation of the computer market and unfair price inflation by keeping it open to competition and innovation.
Vlad Sedach
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