ARCHIVED — Chris Fraser

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 Chris Fraser received on September 12, 2001 via e-mail

Subject:

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
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.

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 use, 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,
Chris Fraser
(Address removed)

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