ARCHIVED — John Selby
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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 Selby received on September 11, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: Canadian copyright reform
Dear Industry Canada and the Intellectual Property Policy Directorate:
As a former exchange student to UCalgary Law School, a student of Canadian Intellectual Property law and an practicing commercial
Internet lawyer in Australia, I write to express my extreme disappointment upon reading that the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI) seeks to replicate in Canadian law the
inanities of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
These measures, based on the DMCA, would give far too much power to publishers, at the expense of the rights of Canadian citizens. 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 Dimitri Skylarov for performing work which is legal in
the country in which he performed it. 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 dealing, 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,
John Selby
John Selby
Solicitor
(Address removed)
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