ARCHIVED — Mantler

COPYRIGHT REFORM PROCESS

SUBMISSIONS RECEIVED REGARDING THE CONSULTATION PAPERS

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Documents received have been posted in the official language in which they were submitted. All are posted as received by the departments, however all address information has been removed.

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Submission from Tony Mantler received on July 28, 2001 4:50 PM via e-mail

Subject: Circumvention and Access Controls

Hello,

I am a canadian, an artist, and a programmer.

Just today, I read the page at overviewing some ideas on copyright reforms.

As the producer of copyrighted works, I appreciate the protection that copyright law provides me in dictating the terms of reproduction for distribution, and first sale distribution.

A few years ago in the US, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) brought the idea of access control into copyright, and set about to legally strengthen the idea of technological access controls. I felt deeply insulted and disturbed by this move, as I feel it irresponsibly and unnesassarily restricted the rights of the purchasers of copyrighted works, significantly - and for the most part silently - reducing the value and utility of the works they purchase.

Unauthorized copying copyrighted works for redistribution online is just as illegal as it is offline. The "need" for content access controls is purely synthetic and alarmist, and should subsequently be ignored and discouraged.

While online distribution provides a low-cost method of unauthorized redistribution, it provides the same opportunities for authorized distribution, and while it is taking some time for content producers to catch up with the new medium, the balance between unauthorized and authorized distribution is none the less normalizing to an acceptable level. Changing the laws, while they would act to restore the balance faster in the near term, would overshoot the balance in the medium and long term, and are as such not something I would reccomend.

I also felt that the move to outlaw the circumvention of access control technologies in the US irresponsibly and unnesassarily restricts the rights of programmers to both research and publish findings in fields of study both directly and indirectly related to content access controls and the technological methods they employ. I find that to be simply unacceptable.

For as long as I can remember, Canada has been a much more free country than the US. Where the US has erred on the side of giving too much power to larger corporations, Canada has usually taken a more sensible and balanced route.

It worries me to now see these new laws being proposed that would follow in the misplaced footsteps of the US.

As for the liability of ISPs, I believe that ISPs should be held liable for the actions of their users provided that A: they are provided with enough documentation of the activities of a user such that they could be reasonably expected to be able to individually identify the customer account in question and B: they subsequently refuse to reveal the identity of the customer account in question.

If it is not possible to provide enough documentation on a user's activity such that they could not be resonably expected to be able to identify the customer account associated with the incidents in question, I do not believe that the ISP should be held liable for the actions of the user.

I most strongly believe that any and all attempts to promote access controls on copyrighted works should be ignored and discouraged. Content access controls benefit only a small number of content producers, most notably the larger ones, at great cost to both the public at large, and (as seen in the DVD CSS fiasco) smaller content producers.

Cheers - Tony 'Nicoya' Mantler :)
(address removed)