ARCHIVED — John Oswald
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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 John Oswald received on September 10, 2001 via e-mail
Subject:
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.
These measures, based on the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act , give far too much power to publishers, at the expense of the rights of individuals. The DMCA itself is already under legal challenge in the US. The CPDCI provisions, which serve no one but corporate copyright interests, are just as unequitable 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.
I would also encourage you to read a story by a Canadian-based author Spider Robinson, entitled Elephant's Memory which is an eloquent supposition of what happens when copyright is imposed in the extreme.
John Oswald
(Address removed)
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