ARCHIVED — Kevin Worth

COPYRIGHT REFORM PROCESS

SUBMISSIONS RECEIVED REGARDING THE CONSULTATION PAPERS

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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.

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Submission from Kevin Worth received on September 12, 2001 via e-mail

Subject: Canadian copyright bill

To Industry Canada, the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Intellectual
Property Policy Directorate and other concerned agencies:

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 US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA),
give far too much power to publishers, at the expense of indivdiuals'
rights. The DMCA itself is already under legal challenge in the US, has
gravely chilled scientists' and computer security researchers' freedom of
expression 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 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,

Kevin Worth
(address removed)