ARCHIVED — Wayne Walter Godbehere

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 Wayne Walter Godbehere received on September 11, 2001 via e-mail

Subject: Canadian copyright reform

To Industry Canada, the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Intellectual Property Policy Directorate:

I would like to express my grave concerns regarding the intellectual property provisions of the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI).

Although I understand the concerns of legitimate copyright holders with the impact of electronic media, the measures, based on the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), give far too much power to publishers, at the expense of the rights of the individual citizen. The DMCA itself is already under legal challenge in the US, has negatively impacted scientists' and researchers' freedom of expression around the world for fear of being prosecuted in the United States.

The CPDCI provisions, serve primarily American corporate copyright interests, are just as overly broad 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 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 facilities are required for lawful uses, that include fair dealing, reverse engineering, computer security research and 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.

Regards,

Wayne Walter Godbehere
(Address removed)