ARCHIVED — Nicholas Solntseff
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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 Nicholas Solntseff received on September 9, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: Canadian copyright reform
To Industry Canada,
the Department of Canadian Heritage,
the Intellectual Property Policy Directorate
and other concerned agencies:
I am writing to protest the proposed extreme intellectual property provisions of the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI).
By slavishly copying the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), you are giving far too much power to publishers, at the expense of individuals' rights. The DMCA itself is already under legal
challenge
in the US and has already resulted in the prosecution of a Russian researcher for allegedly contravening DMCA by publishing results of an investigation into a flawed method of copy
protection. As a result, European and Asian scientists have declared that they will not attend conferences in the USA.
The CPDCI provisions, which serve no one but (largely American) corporate copyright interests, will isolate Canada as well. The provisions 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, and computer security research.
I trust that you will listen to reason and remove the controversial and anti-freedom provisions from the CPDCI language. The DMCA is already an international disaster. Its flaws should not foisted on
Canadians.
Sincerely,
Nicholas Solntseff, CEng BSc PhD MIEEE FBCS
(Address removed)
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