ARCHIVED — Peter McLachlan
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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 Peter McLachlan received on September 8, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: Canadian copyright reform
To whom it may concern,
While I acknowledge the value of copyright law to protect the hard work of authors, musicians and other content creators I have many concerns with the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues.
1) Making it illegal to circumvent technological copy protection measures makes it impossible for citizens to exercise their fair use rights. There is a great deal of evidence that professional pirates will find a way to circumvent almost any system, so the real target of these measures must be assumed to be the average consumer who has a legitimate right to make backup copies of software and music media, and to decide how s/he will use their license to that media. A good example of this is the DVD encryption scheme CSS. This scheme does not prevent professional pirates from making exact DVD duplicates which will play in any DVD player just like the original if duplicated bit-for-bit. It does however prevent consumers from viewing their legally purchased media on the platform of their choice, such as on a computer running an operating system like Linux or FreeBSD.
2) Excessive copy protections encourage piracy. When content is easier to use without protections / obfuscation consumers will switch to pirated material. It is now common for professionals and consumers to buy legal copies of their software and then download pirated versions to actually install because it bypasses technical copy protection measures that can in all case introduce an extra potential for software or hardware failure (frequent in the case of computer software), and in some cases even causes damage to hardware. Technical copyright measures are in all cases consumer unfriendly because the cost of all of these "rights management systems", decryption hardware etc. is passed to the legitimate consumer. We need legislation that punishes those who violate the law not citizens who are in compliance.
3) There are legitimate uses of tools which work around or decrypt technical copyprotection mechanisms. These include using such tools to exercise fair use rights to make backup copies of media, or to view / make legitimate use of legally obtained media on new platforms. Making it illegal to circumvent these mechanisms is akin to making it illegal to sell screwdrivers because they can also be used to force locks.
4) The only way to verify the security of a given system is to attempt to breach that system. Security verification would become illegal as this document presently stands. This is also relevant to academic freedom to research and present research on a free range of topics.
As a Canadian citizen I must express my opinion that Canadians need legislation that best protects the Canadian people, not merely the interests of copyright holders. This is the spirit of democratic government.
Best regards,
Peter McLachlan
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