Justification For Canadian Copyright Reform Revealed

An anonymous reader writes "Michael Geist has used the Canadian freedom of information act to obtain a secret ministerial document on Canadian copyright reform that provides the government position on virtually every controversial issue from last year's Bill C-32. The government has no good explanation for its DMCA approach and calls provisions requiring the destruction of course materials part of an 'essential balance.' On the U.S. piracy watch list, it says 'Canada does not recognize the validity of the Special 301 process and considers it to be flawed. The Report does not employ a clear methodology in its country ranking, as it relies on industry allegations rather than empirical evidence and analysis.'"

Comments

Wow, what a unforseeable shocker

[elrous0]

Canada does not recognize the validity of the Special 301 process and considers it to be flawed. The Report does not employ a clear methodology in its country ranking, as it relies on industry allegations rather than empirical evidence and analysis

They're really surprised that a U.S. government report is based on corporate whoring rather than empirical evidence and analysis? Wow, Canadians really ARE naive.

As to the question of why Canada is adopting anti-circumvention measures (and other provisions) similar to the DMCA, well that's an easy one. They're signatories of the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty. You remember that one, don't you? That's the treaty that a very tiny handful of people (including myself) were decrying fifteen years ago while everyone else was completely fucking ignoring it and its implications. Yeah, that's the same treaty that the vast majority of you probably still don't even know exists (much less that your country quietly signed it right under the press and public's radar). Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Re:Wow, what a unforseeable shocker

[brunes69]

RTFA.

Bill C-32 goes far beyond what is needed by the WIPO treaty. In fact, C-32 does not even have some exemptions that the DMCA has in it.

Re:Owned

[djmurdoch]

That document contains the planned answers to potential questions before a parliamentary committee. They're designed to hide the truth and sounce reasonable. For example, the answer to the question about non-infringing use on p 10 sounds reasonable, but avoids the question: why can't consumers break TPMs for legal uses of the material?

I hate our government....

[mark-t]

Seriously. I hate them. They aren't helping copyright by this, they are harming it.

This bill so effing retarded it's not funny. In particular, the fact that there is no intention whatsoever to allow any exemption to the digital locks provision where the copying is entirely uninfringing is so utterly lacking in even a modest amount of forethought as to wonder how the heck the people who proposed it could even have the mental capacity to have written it down in the first place.

The implication is that the content producer will determine what type of non-infringing copies might be allowed to be created, but this determination is inherently coupled with the availability of particular technology, and could quickly be rendered entirely obsolete, forcing the consumer into a situation where they face vendor lock-in with a brand that is all but irrelevant in the ever-progressing field of technology.

Canadians who even know about this bill are going to presume for themselves that the provisions of this bill are unreasonable, and will summarily ignore it, privately or otherwise, as history is more than enough of an example to show that the general public does not indefinitely continue to follow laws that they believe to be unfair. If they did, nobody would ever speed except by accident, and there would still be racial segregation on buses.

I've written no less than 3 separate letters to our government on this matter, and received exactly one response from the last one which was a form letter highlighting the so-called virtues of this bill, and did not address even a single concern in my actual letter.

I used to think Canada was a great place to live.... now I'm really not so sure.