ARCHIVED — Jason Cornick
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COPYRIGHT REFORM PROCESS
SUBMISSIONS RECEIVED REGARDING THE CONSULTATION PAPERS
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Submission from Jason Cornick received on September 10, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: Canadian copyright reform
To whom it may concern,
It has been brought to my attention that you are considering the introduction of legislation that restricts the rights of people to freedom of public discourse and innovation. By making it illegal to attempt to circumvent copyright measures it eliminates a lot of innovation that occurs that actually help to make more effective security techniques. By making public efforts to 'break' copyright technologies illegal you will be driving the activities underground. The methods to violate the copyright methods will still exist, but there will be no legal forum for public discussion of the methodologies used and methods of improving the copyright systems.
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 reduced scientists' and computer security researchers' freedom of expression around the world for fear of being prosecuted in the US. The Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues(CPDCI) provisions, which serve no one but 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.
Sincerely,
Jason Cornick
(Address removed)
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