Scott asked me for my take on the new Canadian DMCA (and make no mistake, that’s what it is).
Most people know I tend to be somewhat “copyleft” when it comes to my attitudes on copyright; I favour lower terms of private ownership of copyright for a larger public domain, flexible and relatively wide-ranging fair dealing laws, and legal systems that encourage trial use rather than full immediate purchase of intellectual property. Canadian statutory law contains no protections under fair dealing for parody or transformative use; the protections that exist for me when I use Photoshop to make Iron Man say “fuck” exist solely in jurisprudence, and every serious intellectual property law expert in the country has recommended to a number of governments that, hey, maybe we should enshrine that in statute.
Needless to say, Jim Prentice’s bill does none of these things. Michael Geist has already explained at length how the expansions for fair dealing contained within the bill (and fair dealing in general) are almost wholly nullified by the digital lock provisions. This bill makes most fair dealing illegal simply by having the original producer of content put a basic digital lock or DRM on their material. (Or, more simply, your right to make a copy of a song on a CD that you own ends the moment the CD has a simple DRM on it. The tools to evade that DRM? Illegal as of this bill.)
In short it’s a terrible, terrible bill – a sellout to American lobbyists that completely ignores all the effort Canadian citizens made earlier this year to say “hey, this is a shitty bill and we don’t want it.” With any luck, it will be voted down in Parliament. (Of course, the Harper government may go ahead and make it a confidence vote, in which case Stephane Dion will likely run from his own shadow.
Michael Geist has more, of course.
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Actually, I don’t have a problem with this bill per se. I think the issues lay with omissions in other bills.
First:
We need to explicitly enumerate fair dealing/fair use rights.
We need to explicitly state the rights of ownership of a product. That is, when I purchase a work, it is mine for me to do what I please within my own household. I can mix it, record a car CD, Put Rex the Wonder dog stickers on it, whatever, provided I do not distribute it, or perform it publicly.
Obviously, there are some grey areas:
– How many friends can I have over to watch a movie? When does this become an unlicensed public performance?
– Can I lend a friend a DVD or CD? What if I’ve ripped it to my computer? Do I need to delete the ripped files while the source CD is out of my possession?
Once these rights are explicitly enumerated, then we can allow all DRM that doesn’t interfere with these rights, and throw the violators in jail.
However there is a bigger problem:
I need a guarantee that I will be able to play/view/use my purchased media for eternity.
This means that all DRM code MUST be released as open source code. Not necessarily immediately, but it must be released to CIPO or other such body to hold in the event that the producer no longer provides necessary keys/services/other for me to play the media. Until we have such a guarantee of perpetual playability, any law against hacking DRM will necessarily criminalize many legitimate users, (including business users trying to access their own stuff!)
Example:
Vista activation.
Microsoft Vista needs to be activated over a network or it won’t work. If hardware changes, it may need to be re-activated.
Let us suppose that Vista is the finest operating system ever made, and it will serve my needs for many years to come. However, my video card is crap, and I need to replace it every year.
What happens to me when Microsoft shuts down the activation server? It has the effect of taking away from me a product which I honestly acquired and installed in good faith. However, if the activation source was in a repository, then someone could set up their own activation server.
Baldguy: Actually, I don’t have a problem with this bill per se. I think the issues lay with omissions in other bills.
The omissions are in this bill. Lack of explicitly enumerating fair dealing rights isn’t something nobody’s been saying we need to do; every legal critic in the country can tell you that Canada’s fair dealing law is insufficient and out of date, and refusing to address that isn’t an accident; it’s purposeful.
Jim Prentice is outright lying about the bill, claiming that most CDs don’t have digital locks, which is bullshit – just about all of them have digital locks, they just happen to be easy to circumvent. He’s too smart and too involved in the area to not know that.
This is a bill advanced in bad faith.
As someone pointed out elsewhere (Slashdot, I believe), this bill would make citizens who use Linux or MacOS into criminals, since both can bypass DRM. Just one of the many absurdities this bill introduces into our lives.
Man, good luck to you guys on getting this one shot down or amended into reasonable shape.
Its because of this kind of shit that I don’t buy music on CD anymore. Whatever mp3’s I buy from Amazon is all the music industry gets from me.
Naturally, some groups like ABBA and AC/DC have made this difficult and have forced me to buy special encyrpted music from iTunes.
Fortunately this encryption is easy enough to get around and translate into Mp3 and requires no additional software.
This bill also flies in the face of an existing bill that is the reason why our CD and DVD prices are so high — there are extra charges and riders padded onto the base price as compensation. That bill had been introduced and passed as a response to the courts throwing out the lawsuits: The extra money from the riders was supposed to go back to the music industry as their compensation, while preserving Canada’s fair-use and privacy laws. With that bill in place, the courts had even more grounds for throwing out the lawsuits, so much as we might grumble about the prices, it was money well spent on that front. But with this new bill flying in the face of it (an awful lot of people, including ISPs, didn’t even know about the riders bill) this is just going to get messier.
DRM is a lock with the key sitting in it. Making it illegal to circumvent or have the tools for circumvention makes EVERYTHING illegal. Preventing autorun is one way to circumvent certain DRM. What’s this law say about that?
Being able to play a video on your computer defeats region coding. Everyone with a media player is now a criminal?
These business models work by creating a scarce resource (plastic discs covered in bits) which is now obsolete. We need to stop propping up broken business models and get these people competing with each other to serve their customers. Damn. I mean why not force people to buy buggy whips? Seriously.
We’d turn the whips on them, I imagine.
The last 60 or so years has been an abberation in how music comes to the ‘music consumer’. Musicians HAVE a way to get paid, it’s called ‘PLAYING YOUR GODDAMN MUSIC, YOU ASSHOLES’.
Copies of music are a way to get people to come to your show.
Welcome to, well, all of human history EXCEPT for the last 60 years.
And it’s NOT the bands that are complaining, it’s the corporations that have used the law to wrest the copyright from the musicians who, oh, I don’t know, actually PLAY the music.
If you’re making art, then you want more people to experience your art, if you’re working to wrest money from a business model, well then you can try that, and more power to you, but if you fight the advance of technology, start buying those buggy whips, kids. Hell, they even HAD a chance to make this a business model with Napster and look how they screwed THAT particular pooch.
Glad to see you had a take on this, MGK. I’m studying to be a librarian, so I’ll add the Canadian Library Association’s take on the matter. It’s short, and it points out how the “libraries can now email stuff to patrons! yay!” clause actually effectively prevents libraries from doing that (which we’ve been doing for years anyway). There’s no room in library budgets for DRM software.
I’d be impressed if Canadian law was actually made as nice as the DMCA in terms of exemptions to public performance rights. As it stands, schools and libraries (except public libraries, who can reasonably put “for home use only” on a DVD) have to secure public performance rights. Usually it’s cheaper to buy an entire set of encyclopaedias. Or a couple sets.
P.S. HTML, please work…
Yay.
Oh, I should clarify that the public performance exemptions I was talking about are for education purposes. Linky to US Law at Cornell University.