ARCHIVED — Rajiv Narendra Patel
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COPYRIGHT REFORM PROCESS
SUBMISSIONS RECEIVED REGARDING THE CONSULTATION PAPERS
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Submission from Rajiv Narendra Patel received on September 11, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: Comments - Government of Canada Copyright Reform
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 (CPCDI).
These measures, based on the US Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) gives far too much power to publishers, at the expense of individuals' rights. The DMCA is uner legal challenge in US and has caused much consternation amongst scientists and computer security researchers, and restricted their freedom of expression worldwide for fear of being prosecuted in the US and has even resulted in the unjust arrest of Russian software engineer Dmitri Sklyarov. The CPDCI provisions, which serve exclusively the interests of the (largely American) corporate copyright holders, 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, thus illegalizing the production of tools rather than the use of those same tools -- this is analagous to banning the manufacture of baseball bats because they could be used as weapons! 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,
Rajiv Narendra Patel
(Address removed)
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