ARCHIVED — Joseph Kmiec
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COPYRIGHT REFORM PROCESS
SUBMISSIONS RECEIVED REGARDING THE CONSULTATION PAPERS
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Submission from Joseph Kmiec received on September 9, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: To Industry Canada, the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Intellectual Property Policy Directorate
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
I am writing this to express my grave concern regarding the extreme intellectual property provisions of the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI).
These measures are based on the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and don't serve any purpose except giving power to big and greedy corporations. By passing any law based on similar to DMCA we only slow down the technology and deepen the technology resection.
These kinds of laws create nothing to protect intellectual property, they only create "security by obscurity" that will have very deep and sad consequences. We can not hide and protect poor security programming behind any DMCA laws. Example would be poor security programming in Adobe E-Books to prevent copy protection. They tried and succeeded in arresting Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov who helped circumvent Adobe E-Books' security.
This is just a trivial example of poor security programming.
The worst yet to come, a simple example would be to rely on such a poor security programming that Adobe implemented in their E-Books in such industries like energy or power distribution companies, not to mention more important military or nuclear industry. If these kinds of industries will rely on these kinds of security programs protected by any obscure laws as DMCA a disaster is in the making. Foreign hackers don't care about any laws and will use their knowledge to explore any security weakness in our computers.
If the Canadian Government is planning to pass any such laws my suggestion to them would be to remove all firewall programs; they won't need them, they will be protected by the DMCA, won't they?
Regards,
Joseph Kmiec
(Address removed)
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