ARCHIVED — Mark Tarrabain
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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 Mark Tarrabain received on September 13, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: To: Comments - Government of Canada 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 grave concern regarding the extreme intellectual property provisions of the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI), which can be viewed on the Government of Canada web site at http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/rp01099e.html.
These measures, which are similar to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), give far too much power to publishers, at the expense of individuals' rights. 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 a Russian programmer. In light of this, their government has advised its programmers to, if at all possible, avoid traveling to the United States, and these nations are not even at war! The CPDCI provisions, which serve no one but corporate copyright interests, are just as over 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 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. This is because there is absolutely no difference between the technologies which can be employed to exercise fair-use rights and those used to engage in unauthorized duplication of copyrighted materials.
Letting the content industry dictate its terms of use regarding computer equipment not only to flagrantly violate their customer's fair use rights, but also to dictate to the whole of society the way it should use it's own computers is a gross subversion, which should imperatively be rejected with the utmost energy, as it would give a minuscule sector of the economy a totally unwarranted and unmerited influence on the circulation of data, ideas and concepts.
Canada should therefore not legislate against the use of software and/or devices which would allow data users to exert their legal fair use rights. Acting otherwise would surrender totally the freedom of circulation of ideas, a fundamental concept of our society.
I urge you to remove these controversial and anti-freedom provisions from the CPDCI language. The DMCA is already viewed internationally as having disastrous consequences. Its flaws should not be imported and forced on Canadians.
Sincerely,
Mark Tarrabain
(Address removed)
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