ARCHIVED — Stebila

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 Douglas Stebila received on August 27, 2001 2:59 PM via e-mail

Subject: Digital Copyright Reform Comments

2001 August 27

Comments – Government of Canada Copyright Reform
c/o Intellectual Property Policy Directorate
Industry Canada
235 Queen Street
5th Floor West
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0H5
fax: (613) 941-8151

To Whom It May Concern:

I am pleased to have this opportunity to address the Intellectual Property Policy Directorate with regards to the Digital Copyright Reform Process. I address you today in two capacities. Firstly, I address you as a Canadian citizen concerned about my rights regarding digital copyrights. Secondly, I address you as a computer scientist and mathematician who is actively studying, working, and researching in academic fields related to these policies.

Currently, I am studying mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario. I recently received a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to research information-theoretic cryptography at the Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research. I was recently employed at Entrust Technologies, an Ottawa-based cryptography company, and will be working at Sun Microsystems’ research laboratories on elliptic curve cryptography in the coming months.

The Directorate’s consultation process came to my attention through an article submitted to the online forum kuro5hin.org. I am pleased to hear that the Directorate is conducting this consultation process and hope that my feedback on the legal protection of technological measures will be useful to policymakers.

The authors of the "Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues" acutely summarize the problems with the legal protection of technological measures: "the difficulty is that devices which are suited to infringing uses are, by and large, equally suited to non-infringing uses."

Technological measures for protecting digital copyright almost always take the form of encryption. As a researcher in cryptography, I feel that I am qualified to speak on this issue.

Canadians and individuals around the world have, for the past 25 years, had available to them powerful mathematical algorithms for protecting information from other through the use of the cryptography, and non-mathematical techniques have been in existence since the time when information became valuable. In most cases, it is impossible to prove that any information protection technique is secure against all attacks, and often it is known that certain techniques are not secure against computationally unbounded adversaries.

The relative security of encryption algorithms, then, is sometimes measured by the variety of attacks the algorithm can withstand and how long the underlying mathematical structures have been studied. As vulnerabilities in algorithms and attacks exploiting these vulnerabilities are discovered, the knowledge of these vulnerabilities is used in designing the next generations of algorithms. This is the lifecycle of cryptographic algorithm design.

In order for this lifecycle to continue and for Canada to remain a leading player in the world in cryptography, it is essential that researchers and other contributors be able to continue this circular game of "design and attack."

It is my fear that laws preventing the creation, publication, or sale of means for overcoming technical measures will stagnate the cryptographic community in Canada. Without the ability to design, test, and publish exploits against cryptographic algorithms, the sensitive information of Canadians will be protected by weakened and potentially vulnerable cryptographic algorithms.

As the "Consultation Paper" notes, other countries have already implemented laws related to digital copyright. One of these laws is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), introduced in the United States of America; it came into law in 1998. I am aware of a number of situations in which the DMCA’s clauses regarding the protection of technological measures have produced undesired consequences.

In September, 2000, the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) issued a challenge to cryptographers to break their digital watermarking scheme. A group of researchers based out of Princeton University and led by Edward W. Felten of the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University succeeded in defeating a number of the watermark technologies in the challenge. It what has become an ongoing legal battle using the DMCA, the team of researchers has been prevented from presenting their results through the standard academic channels. The following is a statement from the researchers that summarizes their situation:

"On behalf of the authors of the paper "Reading Between the Lines: Lessons from the SDMI Challenge," I am disappointed to tell you that we will not be presenting our paper today.

"Our paper was submitted via the normal academic peer-review process. The reviewers, who were chosen for their scientific reputations and credentials, enthusiastically recommended the paper for publication, due to their judgment of the paper's scientific merit.

"Nevertheless, the Recording Industry Association of America, the SDMI Foundation, and the Verance Corporation threatened to bring a lawsuit if we proceeded with our presentation or the publication of our paper. Threats were made against the authors, against the conference organizers, and against their respective employers.

"Litigation is costly, time-consuming, and uncertain, regardless of the merits of the other side's case. Ultimately we, the authors, reached a collective decision not to expose ourselves, our employers, and the conference organizers to litigation at this time.

"We remain committed to free speech and to the value of scientific debate to our country and the world. We believe that people benefit from learning the truth about the products they are asked to buy. We will continue to fight for these values, and for the right to publish our paper.

"We look forward to the day when we can present the results of our research to you, our colleagues, through the normal scientific publication process, so that you can judge our work for yourselves.

This statement and more information regarding the dispute can be found on the Internet at http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/.

I would like to present a few more cases of troubles with the DMCA and my concerns with those cases.

In a more recent case, a Russian cryptographer was arrested in the United States of America for authoring a piece of software that bypasses the technological measures protecting Adobe eBook documents. The software works on legally purchased works and converts them into a more common format, the Portable Document Format (PDF). This allows the purchaser of the work to move the work to another computer, or to use existing programs with the converted documents. An example of a use of the converted documents that I believe to be reasonable is with a speech program that reads the documents to blind and visually-disabled users. Another use that I believe is reasonable is full-text searching of the document or extraction of portions for citation in accordance with existing copyright laws.

A third case involving technological measures is the circumvention of the Content Scrambling System (CSS) used on DVDs. In 1999, a piece of software called “DeCSS” was released that circumvents CSS. While it is true that DeCSS can be used to make illegal copies of DVDs, it is important to note that the driving force behind the development of DeCSS and the most common uses of it today are for legal uses. Specifically, DeCSS is most often used to watch DVD movies on systems that currently do not have any commercial DVD viewing software available. The Linux operating system, popular among computer programmers and other hobbyists for its similarity to other Unix operations systems, does not have a large enough market share for commercial developers to develop and release Linux-specific DVD software. Many users of the Linux operating systems use DeCSS to watch DVDs that they would otherwise be unable to watch. Similarly, without software like DeCSS, I would be unable to watch DVDs on my Apple computer running the recently-released Mac OS X software.

It is my opinion that the uses that I have described in these preceding cases constitute legitimate uses of certain technological measures that also have illegal uses. It is my perception that the concept of “fair-use” rights covers the legality of these cases, however I would hope that any laws, include digital copyright laws, preserve and enhance these rights.

I would like to mention two more uses of technological measures that were not mentioned above. One is of file-format conversion software, which is essential in any heterogeneous computing environment. Trivial and non-essential encryption inserted into file formats could legally prevent users from converting file formats and destroy the hope of interoperable software, which is essential for a productive computing environment. Another important issue is the ability to access copyrighted content after the copyright has expired. It is important that well-documented methods for accessing this content be available for future generations, or years of Canadian culture may be lost due to encryption and copy-prevention techniques.

It is my hope that any laws in Canada concerning digital copyright law not outlaw the creation of technological measures for copy protection circumvention. I urge policymakers to keep the legality of copying in the act of copying itself and to not limit the creation of technological measures for copy protecting circumvention which also have legal uses.

I look forward to reviewing the feedback of other Canadians on this important topic in our national policymaking.

Respectfully submitted,

Douglas Stebila
[Address and e-mail address removed]

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