ARCHIVED — Evgueni Souleimanov
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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 Evgueni Souleimanov received on September 12, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: Canadian copyright reform
To Industry Canada, the Department of Canadian Heritage, theIntellectual 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
individuals' 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.
Individuals such as the creators of the original works, will not
benefit from this new law, as many cases already show. In fact, the
quality of security measures will decrease and the works will be
compromised more easily. This measure of outlawing "circumvention"
devices (which is similar to locking the houses with strings and
outlawing scissors) will lower the quality of security measures used
in protecting copyrighted works (as the case with Adobe and their poor
protection shows).
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,
Evgueni Souleimanov
(Address removed)
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