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COPYRIGHT REFORM PROCESS
SUBMISSIONS RECEIVED REGARDING THE CONSULTATION PAPERS
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.
Submission from Andrew Bugera received on September 06, 2001 8:06 PM via e-mail
Subject: Copyright Reform Process - Comments
[Address removed]
Thursday, September 06, 2001
To Whom it May Concern,
I am writing to express my concerns and opinions about the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues. I believe there are very serious flaws with the way the United States wrote and acts upon their DMCA.
Artists of all kinds should be able to decide whether or not they want their work to be "made available" to the public. I do not agree that Canada's copyright laws need massive change, but ammendments could be made making all percievable representations defined as "fixed".
In regard to section 4.2, Copyright law should only apply if the circumvention of a protection method results in a work being distributed either against the copyright holder's wishes, or if the circumvention results in a wider, unauthorized distribution. For academic, research, and personal purposes, there should be absolutely no penalty for reverse-engineering, disassembling, or otherwise "getting around" the protection unless it can be proven that it was then used to distribute a work without authorization. Publishing, explaining, providing information on where to find such explanation should also not be subject to any punishment. A magazine was recently sued for providing a link to a location that allowed download of code that could be used to produce a system to decrypt the contents of a DVD. Pirating a DVD requires much less than that. All one has to do is create an exact copy of the disc, and it will run just like a legitimately released one.
Rights management information should be kept in-tact whenever possible. Some data formats, however make it impossible to do so. Again, unless it is used to specifically distribute against the copyright holder's will (or to "pirate" the work), then there should be no effort made to prosecute.
Internet Service Providers operating in Canada or providing service to Canada should be required to enforce Canadian copyright law. If it is proved with either a Court order or documentation from the Copyright office, then the ISP should be forced to inform the account-holder of the offending material and temporarily disable access to it. If a court finds that the material is in fact infringing on a copyright, the ISP would be required to delete the offending material, if not the whole account.
Andrew Bugera (Student)
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