ARCHIVED — David Theodore Rypma

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 David Theodore Rypma received on September 9, 2001 via e-mail

Subject: Comments on the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues

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

I am writing to express my serious concerns regarding the potentially repressive intellectual property provisions of the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI). The government's mandate is ". . . to ensure that the Copyright Act remains among the most modern and progressive in the world . . .". There are elements in the current wording of the CPCDI that suggest repression rather than progression.

These measures, based on the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), give too much control to publishers, at the expense of technological advances and individuals' rights. The DMCA itself is already under legal challenge in the US, has seriously limited scientists' and computer security researchers' freedom of expression around the world for fear of being prosecuted in the US (as you know, it has already resulted in the arrest of a Russian programmer for demonstrating Adobe Systems' seriously flawed technology). A number of the CPDCI provisions serve no one but corporate copyright interests, and 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 often necessary to exercise lawful uses, including fair use, reverse engineering, computer security research and many others. Such restrictions bring to mind an analogy from the beginning of the last century - the restrictions placed on the speed limit of early cars to match that of the horse and buggy they were destined to replace. New legislation is better directed at improving the environment (and technology) in which intellectual property is to exist and prosper. The legislation can best do this by ensuring that only the use of technology to explicitly AND inappropriately bypass valid copyright is covered.

I wish to further urge you to avoid placing undue onus on ISPs to control content that they do not themselves place on their servers. The responsibility and liability must rest with the entity responsible for placement of material. The only exception should be those cases where the ISP can clearly be shown to ignore industry best practice in ensuring their facilities are only available for authorized (and authenticated) use through posted acceptable use policies.

I urge you to remove these controversial and anti-freedom provisions from the CPDCI language. The DMCA is already an example of an international debacle. Its flaws and restrictions should not be imported into Canada and forced on Canadians. Just as it would have made no sense to restrict the use of early printing presses to protect quill-based authors and copiers, it makes no sense to restrict modern research and technology to protect newer forms of Internet and electronic-based intellectual property. Please modify the CPDCI language to help engender the research required to develop better and more creative protective measures needed to disseminate copyrighted materials in our electronic age. Please, look to the future, not the past.

Sincerely,

David Theodore Rypma, SSCP
(Address removed)

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