ARCHIVED — Dennis Carlstrom
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Copyright Reform Process
Submissions Receives Regarding the Consultation Papers
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Submission from Dennis Carlstrom received on September 8, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: Canadian 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
fax: (613) 941-8151
To the Intellectual Property Policy Directorate, Industry Canada, the Department of Canadian Heritage and other concerned agencies:
The purpose of this letter is to express my concern over the extreme intellectual property provisions of the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI).
These measures, modeled after the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), give far too much power to content publishers, at the expense of the rights of individuals. In the U.S., the DMCA is already under legal challenge, as it has seriously limited the freedom of expression of scientists and computer security researchers. The DMCA has already caused a black mark against the U.S. as a result of the arrest of a Russian programmer under its provisions. The CPDCI provisions would serve only corporate copyright interests and are just as overbroad as those of the DMCA.
These provisions, if they were to become part of the Canadian Copyright Act, would ban almost all software and other tools that allow copy prevention technologies to be bypassed. This would violate the guarantee of freedom of speech contained in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and similar guarantees in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as such tools are necessary to exercise lawful uses, including fair use, reverse engineering, computer security research.
I hope that the severity of these controversial issues will compel you to remove these anti-freedom provisions from the CPDCI before it becomes law.
Sincerely,
Dennis Carlstrom
(Address removed)
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