ARCHIVED — Jay M. Hoeberechts
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COPYRIGHT REFORM PROCESS
SUBMISSIONS RECEIVED REGARDING THE CONSULTATION PAPERS
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Submission fromJay M. Hoeberechts received on September 12, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: Canadian Copyright Reform
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).
The proposed act appears very similar to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) already in place in America. I believe these measures would give far too much power to publishers, at the expense of indivdiuals' rights. In fact, in the United States, as the DMCA itself is under legal challenge, and has gravely chilled scientists' and computer security researchers' freedom of expression around the world for fear of being prosecuted in the US. The DMCA has directly resulted in what is in my opinion the unjust 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 software and other tools that allow code residing on the computers of individuals to be altered by those individuals. 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. Such tools are necessary to exercise lawful uses, including fair dealing, reverse engineering, computer security research and many others. Also, it essentially revokes the citizen's legal rights to what s/he wishes with code and data on his or her own computer, and instead advocates corporate control over that data. This seems somewhat analogous to placing a ban on repairing or altering one's car in one's own garage.
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,
Jay M. Hoeberechts, concerned citizen and student
(Address removed)
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