ARCHIVED — Martin Janzen
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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 Martin Janzen received on September 9, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: Withdrawal of offensive CPCDI provisions
To: Industry CanadaIntellectual Property Policy Directorate
I am writing to you because, as a software developer, I am very concerned about the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI); specifically, the overly broad measures for protection of intellectual property.
It is all well and good for publishers of copyrighted works to want to protect their product; however, the proposed measures go much too far. In the U.S. we've seen the fiasco that has resulted from their Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which is already leading to ridiculous cases like the prosecution of Dmitri Sklyarov, to the harsh but futile attempts to suppress the DeCSS program, and to court cases in which organizations like the RIAA are attempting to stifle academic research. This is surely not what U.S. lawmakers had in mind when they naively enacted this nonsense, under pressure from special interests such as the recording industry. The thought of Canada adopting similar bad legislation disgusts me -- all the more so because we have the bad example of the DMCA to learn from, and should therefore know better.
The DCMA, and the similar laws proposed for Canada, give far too much power to publishers and ignore the rights of individuals, notably the right of fair use, the ability to lend or resell a work, and the freedom to conduct research into areas such as cryptography -- in which Canadian companies have, by the way, profited in the past because of silly U.S. laws on the export of already widely available technology.
In the past, copyright law has served us quite adequately despite the lack of technological barriers and the increased ease of copying provided by photocopiers and VCRs, for instance. Now, publishers are introducing access controls, watermarks, encryption technology, and other measures which intent to limit what a buyer can do with his legitimately purchased product. If they could, they would prevent you from making a copy of a song to play in your car, a recording of a TV show that you want to watch later, an excerpt of an article to be used in a review or paper, a program to let you watch your DVD movies on something other than a Microsoft operating system, and any other use which does not fit their narrow vision. And if their technologies are shoddy and flawed -- as in the shameful case of Adobe's eBook -- they would use the law to make up for their incompetence. If they were to get their way, before long we'd be living in the totalitarian world described in the cautionary tale "The Right to Read" (published in the "Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery", Feb. 1997, and available at http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/philosophy/right-to-read.html).
The proposed laws 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 guarantee of freedom of speech in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, among other things, because these tools are required for many other perfectly legitimate purposes: fair use, research into computer security, reverse engineering, and so on. Not only will these laws violate the rights of Canadians, they will cause even more Canadian software companies and developers to leave for more hospitable jurisdictions. And they will further reduce people's respect for a legal system and a government that is willing to sell them out so readily in favour of special interests -- particularly those of the recording industry which, as we've seen with the CD-R tax, shows no restraint as to the depths to which it will stoop.
As a software developer and a Canadian citizen, I am urging you to remove these offensive sections from the CPDCI. The fact that the Americans choose to violate their citizens' rights through an embarassment such as the DMCA does not mean that Canada automatically needs to follow suit. Please stand up for what's right, and reject this nonsense firmly and unequivocally.
Sincerely,
Martin Janzen
(address removed)
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