ARCHIVED — Orin Durey
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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 Orin Durey received on September 13, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: Comments - Government of Canada Copyright Reform
Dear Industry Canada and the Intellectual Property Policy Directorate:
In spite of the tragedy in the U.S. of the past couple of days (no mail moving in and out of this Arctic community due to the grounding of all aircraft in Canada) and the short deadline for submissions to IC and the Directorate (2001 09 15), I am writing to express my concerns regarding the extreme intellectual property provisions of the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI). I have downloaded the Consultation Paper and am alarmed at the provisions contained in the Paper and the unnecessary parroting of the World Intellectual Property Organisation's (WIPO) recommended legislation.
In these difficult times, I think it is especially important for Canada to maintain some independence from the U.S. in important areas such as copyright legislation. These measures appear to be based on the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and give far too much power to publishers, at the expense of indivdiuals' rights. Recent actions in the U.S. have been expanded the scope of the DMCA well beyond its original authors' intent. The DMCA itself is already under legal challenge in the U.S., has gravely chilled scientists' and computer security researchers' freedom of expression around the world for fear of being prosecuted in the U.S., and has resulted in the arrest of a Russian programmer after he presented a paper at a computer conference in San Jose. The CPDCI provisions, which serve no one but (largely American) corporate copyright interests like Adobe, 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 use, 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.
Yours truly,
Orin Durey
(Address removed)
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