ARCHIVED — Laura & Bill Gunn
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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 Laura & Bill Gunn received on September 13, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: Comments - Government of Canada Copyright Reform
To Industry Canada, the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Intellectual Property Policy Directorate and other concerned agencies:
As a Canadian citizen I write to express my grave concern regarding the extreme intellectual property provisions of the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI).
These measures, based on the infamous US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), give far too much power to publishers, at the expense of citizens’ rights. The DMCA itself is already under legal challenge in the US, has gravely circumscribed scientists’ and computer security researchers’ freedom of expression, threatening the free publication of scientific papers, around the world for fear of being prosecuted in the US, and resulted in the arrest of a Russian programmer. The CPDCI provisions, which serve no one but (largely American) corporate copyright interests, are just as excessive 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. The manufactures of crowbars are not prosecuted because the tools they produce can be used for a break in, there are many important legal uses for such tools. Computer code is a form of speech and to suppress the free production of code in this way is a totalitarian suppression of free speech. Are we to throw away our inalienable rights so there is no risk that Disney has its latest cartoon feature copied - I value my rights and freedoms more highly than that.
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. I hope that we Canadians will not give up our rights to free speech under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as easily as the Americans have discarded their First Amendment Rights otherwise we will no longer be the "~True north brave and free" but the "false north cowardly and muzzled".
Sincerely,
Laura & Bill Gunn
(Address removed)
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