ARCHIVED — Allan Mertner
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COPYRIGHT REFORM PROCESS
SUBMISSIONS RECEIVED REGARDING THE CONSULTATION PAPERS
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Submission from Allan Mertner received on September 8, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI)
To the Intellectual Property Policy Directorate,
Please consider this an expression of serious concern regarding the extreme intellectual property provisions of the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI).
The measures, which appear to be based on the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) of the USA, significantly change the balance between publishers and indiciduals in the direction of publishers, and I find this most unfortunate.
As you are probably aware, the DMCA itself is being legally challenged in the US, and has seriously impacted scientists' and computer security researchers' freedom of expression around the world for fear of being prosecuted in the US. Most publicly, it resulted in the arrest of a Russian programmer who to my eyes had done nothing wrong, morally or legally, by highlighting serious issues with a copyright scheme The CPDCI provisions, which serve no one but (mostly American) corporate copyright interests, are just as overbroad as those of the DMCA.
In Europe, the European Commission has recently passed a Crime in Cyberspace Treaty, which was motivated by the same concerns as the CPCDI, but in my opinion is a much better solution. I would encourage you to study this treaty, which isn't perfect by far, but is way better than the DMCA.
These provisions currently under consideration would amend the Canadian Copyright Act to ban, with few or no exceptions, software and other tools that allow copy prevention technologies to be bypassed. This would violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantee of freedom of speech, and similar guarantees in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, since such tools are necessary to exercise lawful uses, including fair use, reverse engineering, computer security research and many others.
I urge you to remove these controversial and anti-freedom provisions from the CPDCI language. The DMCA is already an international debacle. Its flaws should not be imported and forced on people like myself who choose to live in Canada - not the US. At least I *thought* Canadians were more sensible that USAnians :)
Sincerely,
Allan Mertner
(Address removed)
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