ARCHIVED — Ben Sargent
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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 Ben Sargent received on September 12, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: Canadian copyright reform
To Industry Canada, the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Intellectual Property Policy Directorate and other concerned agencies:
I am writing to express my deep concern over the extreme intellectual property provisions of the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI).
These provisions give extraodinary power to publishers, at the expense of individual consumer rights. As an artist/designer, I rely on copyright to preserve my rights for content that I create. As a consumer, I am guaranteed certain lawful uses of copyrighted material, including fair dealing, reverse engineering, computer security research and many others. Existing laws are sufficient to preserve my rights as a creator AND as a consumer. Please don't make the same mistake that was made by the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which has resulted in supression of legal research and expression, and even the arrest of a Russian programmer.
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.
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,
Ben Sargent
(Address removed)
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