ARCHIVED — Greer Pedoe

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 Greer Pedoe received on September 12, 2001 via e-mail

Subject: Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues

As I'm a university student in my 3rd year of a Computer Science degree at the University of Waterloo, you can imagine that I do not have a lot of time to pontificate about issues that should not even exist, so I will be brief.

In regards to the "Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues" I would like to say, quite simply,

"NO."

I must admit that I have not had the time to read the aforementioned paper, but it is my understanding that it is similar to the DMCA that the US Government has imposed upon its citizens. I won't bore you with the obvious arguments that it is against the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the palpable finger pointing to all the events that have followed from the DMCA's inception in the USA, because you already know all this. But, I would like to say this:

If you give companies and private organizations the power to control the private activities of anyone they feel like, what do you think will happen?
Trusting you not to make the wrong decision,

Greer Pedoe.

(Address removed)

-----Below is the template letter I should be using

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,

Greer Pedoe.

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