ARCHIVED — Scott Gregory
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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 received on September 11, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: Comments on CPCDI
To Industry Canada, the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Intellectual Property Policy Directorate and other concerned agencies:
I am writing to express my concern regarding the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI) document online.
These measures, which appear to be based on the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), tip the balance of legal rights to the favour of publishers, at the expense of individual users' rights.
At the lightweight end of the spectrum, the ability for a user to create personal copies and compilations of music and other works will be impacted. When one cannot copy a work by legitimate means, fair use is no longer possible.
At the other end of the spectrum, in the US, the DCMA has led to a chilling effect on the research community, and the resulting non-disclosure of security holes and other bugs in software resulting from the fear of prosecution, will have severe consequences. By not allowing legitimate research into security and security holes in software by 'White Hat' hackers, we will leave ourselves more open to attacks from 'Black Hat' hackers, who are under no compunction to follow the law, and would find these new restrictions no more onerous than present legislation.
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.
urge you to remove these controversial provisions from the CPDCI language. The DMCA is already an international debacle. Its flaws should not be imported and forced on Canadians.
Sincerely,
Scott Gregory(address removed)
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