ARCHIVED — Conner

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 Jim Conner received on September 9, 2001 via e-mail

Subject: Anti-DMCA - extreme intellectual property provisions of the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI)

To Industry Canada, the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Intellectual Property Policy Directorate and other concerned agencies:

I write to express my grave concern regarding the extreme intellectual property provisions of the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI).

I CANNOT BELIEVE YOUR GOVERNMENT IS GOING TO PASS A LAW SIMILAR TO THAT OF THE DMCA HERE IN THE UNITED STATES! I am so dissappointed in this law that for your government to even be thinking about it frankly puts a bitter taste in my mouth that cannot be washed away!

This law is utterly evil! It is wrong! It is unethical, immoral, and unorthodox! It was put in place by a crooked man (President Clinton) and upheld by greedy politicians and corporate special interest groups! The DMCA in the United States goes against everything that the United States was built upon and the Canadian government is being opportunistic in attempting to forge a similar law.

Do yourselves a favor, do your country and your fellowmen a favor and leave this idea in the dust.

Some quotes: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/14179.html

"When conservative US Senator Orrin Hatch (Republican, Utah), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sponsored a particularly twisted piece of legislation called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) back in 1998, it was immediately clear that the powerful recording and movie industry lobbies had managed, finally, to get their wish-lists signed into law.

Hatch's DMCA is a veritable masterpiece of internal inconsistencies, contradictions, and fraudulent assurances purporting to protect the 'fair use' of copyrighted material, clearly written by recording and movie industry flacks who have since delighted in splitting the hairs and treading the thin edges as they assail the very 'fair use' which the Act so touchingly, and impotently, bleats about.

Having grasped, with enviable prescience, the implications of nascent high-tech tools which would soon enable it to control content, the entertainment industry sought to vouchsafe these blessings to itself and its posterity in the guise of protecting content, a vastly different and admittedly admirable goal which no politician in his right mind would dare oppose. Senator Hatch, a decent man -- a law-and-order straight-shooter and perennial friend of free enterprise -- was only too willing to lend a hand in this seemingly noble venture. Two years would pass before the Senator would grasp the slick way in which the entertainment industry had made him their patsy.

In reality, the DMCA is an industry Trojan Horse voted into law by well-intentioned legislators naturally eager to defend copyrights, as required by no less an authority than the US Constitution. What it actually does is make it a crime to defeat a technical access control, such as a weak crypto scheme or an electronic watermark, behind which entertainment content or a software application might rest secure from copyright infringement.

The Act's fair use exceptions and safe harbors are couched in such weasel-wording that the entertainment industry has found itself at liberty to stifle, by the mere threat of lawsuits under the DMCA, small fry who might have a decent claim to its protection, but who can't afford to mount a defense case. This, clearly, is by design. The powerful lobbying groups, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), whose flacks helped draft the Act, have since wielded it as a club, intimidating all but the best-heeled targets into acquiescing rather than seeking the DMCA's weak protections in court. The RIAA undoubtedly sized up Napster and judged it a vulnerable small-fry player, but in that case they very clearly miscalculated."

Note, that many oppose this absurd act and everything it stands for. I wish I could express my abhorrence and distress more clearly in words but I cannot. I absolutely urge you fine folks to be an example to the United States and forget that this whole thing even came about. Leave the DMCA idea behind. Move on to the things that are important like domestic needs for children and folks who are homeless. The DMCA benefits nobody except those who need no benefit. In fact, it only hurts everybody! Ask Dmitry and his family how they have been wronged by our crooked US government. This man is an example of the acts of evilness of our government.

You folks can be better than this. I ask you to find it in your hearts to see my point.

Oh, one more thought. It all comes down to this: Suppose that the DMCA was written not regarding technology and whatnot but regarding knives. If the DMCA were likened to the ownership of knives then the DMCA would make owning a knife illegal. Nevermind that, currently, the ownership of a knife is harmless but it is the illegal act with that knife that is of course punishable by law. However, The DMCA supercedes these boundaries and the mere ownership of that knife is made illegal. Even so, the fact that a person owns a piece of software that has the ability to decrypt copyrighted work, is this mere possession illegal? I would think not. A copyrighted work was never violated. However, the DMCA makes the mere ownership of this kind of technology illegal. It makes the mere writing of such a work illegal. What is next? Are we gonna have to pay to read Alice in Wonderland out loud? Oops, that's been done already too. When will it end? I'm telling you, it won't. This just shows how much a government is out to cover itself instead of its people.

Let the blasted corporations fend for themselves!! The government need not get involved with such private matters. This is entirely not the way freedom should be. This war will wage on forever until the light of the situation is dealt with morally and properly. If your government passes such a law, this to me looks like your government will have been jumping on a bandwagon; in this case, a broken one.

I realize I am not a citizen of your country, but I speak for myself and all those who oppose the very idea of this kind of law and I felt it important to let you know that not even the Americans support your desires to pass such a law.

Good day.

Sincerely,
Jim Conner
(Address removed)

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