ARCHIVED — Mark Chandra Dhas
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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 Chandra Dhas received on September 13, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: I SAY NO TO THE CPDCI
To Whom it may concern at Industry Canada, the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Intellectual Property Policy Directorate and other concerned agencies:
This email is to convey my growing concern regarding the new intellectual property provisions of the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI)
The new act, should it go ahead would be similiar to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). It has already been demonstrated that the DMCA has given publishers far too much power, at the expense of individual artists rights. I wish to remind you, as you probably already know the DMCA is already under legal challenge in the US. The DMCA has given not only artists cause for concern but scientists and computer researchers. The arrest of a Russian programmer in Las Vegas (as I recall) was an indication of the wide reaching implications of such an act. 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,
Mark Chandra Dhas
(Address removed)
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