ARCHIVED — Christopher S Beck

COPYRIGHT REFORM PROCESS

SUBMISSIONS RECEIVED REGARDING THE CONSULTATION PAPERS

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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.

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Submission from Christopher S Beck received on September 10, 2001 via e-mail

Subject: Concern about possible restrictions to fair use

To Industry Canada, the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Intellectual Property Policy Directorate and other concerned agencies:

I write to express my grave concern regarding the extreme intellectual property provisions of the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI).

These measures, based on the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), give far too much power to publishers, at the expense of indivdiuals' rights. The DMCA itself is already under legal challenge in the US, has gravely chilled scientists' and computer security researchers' freedom of expression around the world for fear of being prosecuted in the US, and resulted in the arrest of a Russian programmer. The CPDCI provisions, which serve no one but (largely American) corporate copyright interests, are just as overbroad as those of the DMCA.

These 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, computer security research and many others. It would mean that I would no longer be able to use tools that would allow me to quote sections of copyright protected material for the purposes of satire, review, criticism or other forms of commonly accepted speech. I could not use tools which would allow me to time-shift material which I had purchased the right to view. I could not maintain a backup of some material for insurance purposes. All of these rights are time honoured acceptable uses which would be restricted. Copyright law was created to help creators earn some reward for their efforts, but these new proposals would vastly increase their rights and drastically restrict the consumers rights. In an age where huge new markets and vastly increased audiences are providing greater profits than ever to copyright holders, what need is there to further restrict consumers rights? If copyright law has been inexistence for something like 100 years with a happy balance between rights and restrictions, why drastically change the emphasis now? Copyright holders cried foul with the introduction of cassette tapes (both for audio and vidoe) and yet neither of those technologies did anything but increase their profits. Copyright holders would naturally want to retain all rights for their product and generate more and more profits but their rights should be no more prominent than those of consumers. There is no reason to increase the powers of copyright holders and restrict those of consumers.

I urge you to remove these controversial and anti-freedom provisions from the CPDCI language. The DMCA is already an international debacle. Its flaws should not be imported and forced on Canadians.

Sincerely,

Christopher S Beck
(Address removed)

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