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COPYRIGHT REFORM PROCESS
SUBMISSIONS RECEIVED REGARDING THE CONSULTATION PAPERS
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Submission from Jonathan Gordon received on September 08, 2001 2:39 PM by fax
Subject: Comments - Government of Canada Copyright Reform
Comments - Government of Canada Copyright Reform
c/o Intellectual Property Policy Directorate
Industry Canada
235 Queen Street
5th Floor West
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0H5 Canada
To the members of the Intellectual Property Policy Directorate of Industry Canada,
I am writing you to implore a more critical review of any amendments made to the Canadian Copyright act. I fear similar repercussions in the high-tech industry as those felt when the American law was drafted for their own copyright amendments, the DMCA. It has shown itself to be largely useless for the general public, instead catering to the interests of the primarily American mammoth corporations. We mustn't allow the basic rights assured in our constitution to be trampled by the corporate interests of foreign companies.
The right to free speech is hanging in the balance, and as a country we must decide which direction we will choose in the new millennium. It has become clear that the music and film industries are not interested in protecting the rights of artists, but rather in maintaining their strangle-hold on production and distribution, to the point where they will block any outside production in the market share they've chosen to ignore! These sorts of tactics, demonstrated in the MPAA's (Motion Picture Association of America) denial of Linux open source consumer platform development, will only serve to limit the scope of consumer freedom and rescind the rights previously granted to the public. The benefits of Reverse Engineering and Circumvention are too great for the general public to justify a ban on such activity. We must act to preserve thses rights the industries have lobbied to destroy, or we will face losing more than mere money: we will lose our freedom.
It is clear we have been giving a chance to improve our approach to copyright inthe new millennium with the clear example of America's failed DMCA. Your directorate has been given the important duty of weighing the needs of Canada, and as such carry more responsibility than most Candians realize. You must always remember that it is the people who form the country, not the corporations, and so the CPDCI must be laws designed for the advancement of the people, not the cupidity of lucre seeking corporations.
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