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SOPA-style Amendments Dropped From C-11; DRM Provisions Not
New submitter Ashenkase writes "Michal Geist reviews what stayed and what was rejected by the Bill C-11 Committee Review. Looks like SOPA-style amendments are dropped except Digital Locks. There is still a chance for Canadians to have their voices heard before third reading: 'The Bill C-11 legislative committee concluded its clause-by-clause review yesterday as eight government amendments were added to the bill and all opposition amendments were defeated. The amendments included an expanded enabler provision and some modest tinkering to other elements of the bill. There are still several steps needed before the bill passes including third reading at the House of Commons, Senate review, and ultimately royal assent, but Canadian copyright reform is well on its way to completion before the summer starts. In the days leading up to the clause-by-clause review, many focused on three key issues: no SOPA-style amendments such as website blocking or warrantless disclosure of information, maintaining the fair dealing balance found in the bill, and amending the digital lock provisions. By that standard, the changes could have been a lot worse. The government expanded the enabler provision, though not as broadly as CIMA requested. Virtually all other copyright lobby demands — website blocking, notice-and-takedown, iPod tax, copyright term extension, disclosure of subscriber information — were rejected. Moreover, the provisions supported by consumer and education groups including user generated content protection, time shifting, format shifting, backup copies, Internet provider liability, and statutory damages reform were left untouched. This represents a major victory for the many Canadians and groups such as Open Media that spoke out on these issues.'"
Our Dear Leader will just try again in a few months. He won't stop until his corporate buddies get everything they want.
Imagine if a stand-alone DRM supporting law was created in a place, there would be uproar.
Don't be happy until this crap is completely dead.
I voiced my complaint to my local representative and got back a form letter that said basically everyone who read the legislation is wrong and C-11 is nothing but puppy dogs and unicorns.
Whatever you may think of him, we're four years away from a federal election and Harper's Conservatives control parliament the C-11 committee. If Stephen Harper want to give his "corporate buddies" "everything they want," he wouldn't need to "try again in a few months." The amendments would have been approved, and the bill would pass the house of commons. In fact, C-11 is a reintroduction of a bill that died on the order paper last parliament, so they wouldn't have even needed to put them in as amendments: "everything they want" would have been introduced with the rest of the bill at second reading. Either way, any public outcry would be drowned out in a few weeks by the forthcoming budget debate.
Don't be a moron. It's not an endearing quality.
Dear Anonymous Coward,
Thank you for your recent correspondence regarding the Lawful Access tools in our proposed legislation. I am always happy to respond to the questions and concerns of my constituents.
Our Government is strongly committed to ensuring that Canadians’ rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms are respected.
The new lawful access tools proposed in our legislation will not derogate from existing safeguards and privacy protections. The need to respect a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy, as protected under the Charter, always guides law reform. Such authority will continue to be exercised bearing in mind privacy rights under other legislation, such as the Privacy Act and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.
Police will still be required to obtain judicial authorizations in order to obtain information under our legislation and law enforcement agencies will not be able to intercept private communications or obtain transmission data without being authorized to do so by law. Let me be very clear: the police will not be able to read emails or view web activity unless they obtain a warrant issued by a judge.
While technology has advanced significantly over the past four decades, the legal frameworks and investigative tools available to the police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) have not kept pace with this evolution. This proposed legislation would provide law enforcement and CSIS with the modern investigative tools they need to help fight crime and thwart national security threats.
The investigative tools created in this legislation preserve existing safeguards, such as requirements for warrants, court authorizations or other lawful authority to target specified communications. They are time-limited, and nothing put forward in the proposed legislation would reduce the existing safeguards.
Thank you again for taking the time to write regarding this issue. If you have any further questions or concerns please do not hesitate to contact my office.
Yours sincerely,
Hon. Gary Goodyear, P.C., M.P.
Cambridge-North Dumfries
For the most part, C-11 is puppy dogs and unicorns. Remember that Star Wars reedit which made slashdot a few days ago? It wasn't released, copyright concerns and all... C-11 is supposed to update copyright law to reflect changes in technology. One of those technology changes is low cost and widely available production/editing software and equipment, and so one C-11's updates is to make use of copyrighted content in private noncommercial projects (like that Star Wars reedit) explicitly legal.
I've read the entire bill, and as far as I can tell the only bad thing about it is the digital locks provision, which is just a small part. If your complaint was about how awful C-11 was and SOPA this and SOPA that, like almost all of the criticisms I've seen, then they were right. C-11 is not and has never been anything close to resembling SOPA, and with the conclusion of the legislative committee, it will continue to be nothing like SOPA.
The digital locks provision certainly is distasteful, but it's hard to take criticisms of a bill seriously which fail to demonstrate more than a passing acquaintance with its actual contents.
Just to clarify, as much as I hate the DRM provisions, and as stupid as they're being about them, the SOPA-style provisions were never in the bill in the first place. The copyright lobbyists wanted them put in, but they were denied in these hearings.
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
That's because the actual contents don't matter - they're completely bypassed by the "small part" of the bill.
I don't care to read the rest of the bill, because it doesn't matter. If all one needs to do is slap a digital lock on a work to completely bypass fair use, then why should I read the rest of the bill?
The digital lock provision isn't a "small part" of the bill.
The digital locks provision isn't just distasteful. It allows copyright holders to trump pretty much all other rights, so long as there's some kind of a digital lock in place. Think about the logical conclusion of that: By slapping a ROT13 cipher on anything you produce, you can trump academic use rights, personal use rights, reporting use rights, and more. The loophole is so big, you could fly a 747 through it.
"I've read the entire bill, and as far as I can tell the only bad thing about it is the digital locks provision, which is just a small part."
It may be a small part in writing, but it affects almost everything in there. It means that the copyright holders can trump any of the more enlightened provisions in the new law by installing DRM on their content. Want to format-shift your DVDs as the new bill claims you can do legally? No go. Not unless it's a DVD without CSS, which are extraordinarily rare, and most DVDs have additional DRM. Same for all sorts of things. Don't want to fish the CD off the shelf every time you want to play a game? Usually I'd install a NoCD patch for my legitimately purchased games. Not legal anymore.
The "digital locks" provisions negate most of the good points about the rest of the bill, and that's despite year after year of people pointing out the problem through multiple revisions of this bill. The facts are pretty clear that the current government doesn't care about the problem and wants to ram it through parliament anyway. They think Canadians are stupid, because when the government advertises "the new bill now lets Canadians legally do things they've always done anyway (e.g., format shifting)", the bill actually does the opposite, and makes many things technically illegal in the majority of circumstances whereas previously you could have defended yourself on the grounds of "fair dealing" and ignored the DMCA-like provisions (because they didn't exist yet). Wherever DRM is implemented, it rolls back the "fair dealing" rights we finally gained when the supreme court ruled on the matter back in 2004.
I don't like it, but apparently when this passes I'm going to have to break the law to get rid of the DRM on content I've legitimately purchased and want to use on whatever devices I wish. People who care about following the law are worse off.
But that's the evil brilliance of bill. That one little digital lock provision undermines everything else in the bill like a puppy-killing unicorn. Removing a "digital lock" (AKA DRM) is illegal EVEN IF you are doing it to create something that is otherwise legal under the other parts of the bill like time-shifting, format-shifting and yes even the noncommercial Star Wars re-edit (it's pretty hard to re-edit something without source material, and the Star Wars prequels have never been released in a non-DRM format).
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