ARCHIVED — Vagelis Zervas

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,

Vagelis Zervas

Agiou Georgiou 16

Greece