ARCHIVED — Josh York
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COPYRIGHT REFORM PROCESS
SUBMISSIONS RECEIVED REGARDING THE CONSULTATION PAPERS
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Submission from Josh York received on September 12, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: canadian copyright reform
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,
Josh York
Learn from U.S. mistakes!
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Everyone should have http://www.freedom2surf.net/
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