ARCHIVED — Brad Haines
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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 Brad Haines received on September 9, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: CPDCI comments
Greetings,
I am writing to you about the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI).
I am quite frankly frightened that Canada would even consider implimenting measures even remotly close to the american Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998.
I fully agree that legislation needs to be in place to protect copyrights in the digital era, but special attention and protection needs to be payed to preserving fair use rights currently held in the non-digital realm. As has been proven in the states, the law can be perverted to allow far more control by the copyright holder than was originally intended.
The interntions of a person, thier location, and other factors need to be taken into consideration. Legitimate research is apolitical. If I had a copyrighted work protected by another companies software (as in the case of e-books) , I would want the right to be able to try and break the companies software to find out how strong the software was to make sure my work was protected adaquatly. Anyone who tries hard enough, could copy a protected work, and should be published, but research to find out if it's possible should not be outlawed, only the actual act of copying a work for purposes not covered in fair use doctrine currently enjoys in the non-digital realm (in the case of e-books, breaking copyright on an e-book reader to find out that it uses really poor encryption. This will help me protect furture works. However, outlawing it will not stop anyone else from exploiting that bad encryption from pirating my work, especially if I am not allowed to alert my fellow artists as to the situation.)
I urge you to remove these controversial and anti-freedom provisions from the CPDCI language, and re-write with the idea of keeping fair-use fair. The DMCA is already an international debacle. Its flaws should not be imported and forced on Canadians. We need to set an example of how to do it properly. If this does not happen, I think that you will find a great may of the technical persons familiar with this issue may leave the country for a country where our skills are not outlawed.
Sincerely,
Brad Haines
Network Engineer, Encryption researcher
(Address removed)
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