ARCHIVED — Jason Scott Parsons
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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 Jason Scott Parsons received on September 10, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: Canadian copyright reform
To Brian Tobin and Industry Canada:
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 while he was a keynote speaker at a conference on US soil. 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.
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.
Copyright law, from which this concept of "intellectual property" sprang was a set of laws GRANTED TO ARTISTS to allow them to earn a living off their creation and encourage them to continue working. Now business models based on buying and selling those copyrights. Why is it suddenly more important that we protect the business model of distributors of copyrighted material than it is to protect the freedom that allows the content creators to build upon prior knowledge?
Are we trying to create a country with an industry that is crippled by legislated protectionism that will be overrun in the global market by countries that aren't similarily handicaped? Are we willing to make scientific research and dissemination of technical knowledge illegal in order to grant copy CONTROL to distributors of copyrighted material, thus completely removing the right to copy?
Sincerely,
Jason Scott Parsons
(Address removed)
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