ARCHIVED — Jason W. Collinge
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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 Jason W. Collinge received on September 13, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: Don't do it!
To Industry Canada, the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Intellectual Property Policy Directorate and other concerned agencies:
RE: Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI).
Don't do it guys, the whole DMCA idea is faulty and we don't need a repeat of that American blunder up here. I'm a Computer Science Major at the University of British Columbia and I've already seen the effects the DMCA has had on research across the globe. The CPDCI provisions serve no one but (largely American) corporate copyright interests, are just as overbroad as those of the DMCA. It is morally and ecconomically wrong to support legislation that would see programmers arrested here for working on projects that are legal in the rest of the world and which are not intended for illegal use. Should we start arresting phone operators because criminals use their phone system to plan crimes?
Computer security is a major problem globally, but acts like the DMCA and CPDCI serve to hinder improvement - not help it. The resulting limiting of research on these technologies serves only to protect the criminal element who will no longer have to contend with global efforts to improve security. They will only have to deal with the efforts of a few major corporations who can never hope to keep up! The companies that are pushing acts such as these fail to realize that they themselves will become the victims of these acts as computer security advances slow to a crawl.
The following is from a canned letter, but I agree quite strongly:
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,
Jason W. Collinge
(Address removed)
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