ARCHIVED — Chris Studholme
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COPYRIGHT REFORM PROCESS
SUBMISSIONS RECEIVED REGARDING THE CONSULTATION PAPERS
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.
Submission from Chris Studholme received on September 12, 2001 via e-mail
To Industry Canada, the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Intellectual Property Policy Directorate and other concerned agencies:
The United States claims to be the "brightest beacon of freedom"; however, I do not believe this to be so and the US DMCA is proof of my belief. Canada also claims to be a free society and the only way we can ensure that this is really so is to rework and reduce copyright (and patent) monopoly rights offered to corporations and individuals. We need to ensure that ours laws exist to directly benifit the majority of Canadian citizens; not solely to benifit large corporations. Below is a template letter provided to me by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I happen to agree with this text completely so I have included it below:
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 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 Studholme, MSc
(Address removed)
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