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The Canadian DMCA Battle Concludes: How Thousands of Canadians Changed Copyright
An anonymous reader writes "Nearly 15 years of debate over digital copyright reform will come to an
end today as Bill C-11, the fourth legislative attempt at Canadian
copyright reform, passes in the House of Commons. Many participants in
the copyright
debate view the bill with great
disappointment, pointing to the government's decision to adopt
restrictive digital lock rules as a signal that their views were
ignored. Despite the loss on digital locks, the "Canadian copyright"
led to some dramatic
changes to Canadian copyright with some important wins for
Canadians who spoke out on copyright. The government expanded fair
dealing and added provisions on time shifting, format shifting,
backup copies, and user generated content in response to public
pressure. It also included a cap on statutory damages, expanded
education exceptions, and rejected SOPA-style amendments."
What good do all those "time shifting, format shifting, backup copies" exemptions do when the digital lock provisions make them all completely illegal anyway? Sure, you can backup and format shift your DVD's, just as long as you don't break the CSS encryption to do so. In other words, it's illegal to format shift or backup your DVD's/Blu-rays/etc.
I mean, let's face it. No one gives a shit about format-shifting or backing up their own home videos. The whole point of format shifting is to move COMMERCIAL material from my physical DVD/Blu-ray to my computer.
Canadians must have a very different definition of "important wins" than us Americans. This is nothing less than a complete and outright victory for Hollywood and the media powers.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
But still sucks.
This is largely the problem with law. You can just keep on trying, until the public runs out of energy fighting it or it succeeds by fluke. If this hadn’t passed we’d be reading stores about the 5’th attempt, then the 6’th. In a weird way I’m glad it’s finally over.
And the digital locks thing sucks big time. I mean practically speaking, I’d still feel safe ripping a DVD at home it’s the guys writing the software that enables me to do this that are going to be hit. Just in principle it annoys me that it is no longer legal in many cases for me to make backups (or realistically make copies and keep the original media as backup) of media I purchased.
It’s infuriating, because I buy media to rip it onto my computer where I ultimately watch/listen to it. I do this despite it being considerably _less_ convenient then downloading it for _free_ because despite my hatred of big media, I still don’t think it entitles me to just grab their stuff for free. I (figuratively) have money, sitting in my pocket, that I would happily spend on high quality DRM free downloads if anyone would offer them to me. They don’t. So I do it the hard way.. and now they are making that somewhat illegal, in some pretend effort to prevent me from going the absolute easiest and quickest route (just downloading the damn thing) .. which is exactly what it will drive me to! I still don't feel I am somehow entitled to media on my terms.. but I've just stopped caring.
It depends on the enforcement and wording. For example, the DMCA only protects 'effective' countermeasures. One argument that has been made is that any countermeasure that has been compromised is no longer effective, which would mean that the act of breaking DRM would demonstrate that it was not effective and therefore not protected by the DMCA. If the Canadian version has similar wording and courts uphold this interpretation, then it's a win...
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Last week my wife wanted an eBook, but it wasn't available through Amazon. She bought it through Kobo, then removed the Kobo DRM and converted it to a .mobi and put it on her Kindle. It's nice to know that this is now legal format shifting and also illegal lock breaking. What a relief it is to have that kind of clarity. It's nice to know that the Harper government considers this acceptable because "It's unlikely that copyright holders would consider it worthwhile to sue individual violators". This makes me feel so safe. At least it's still just a civil violation, not a 10 year felony ;) It's still absolutely insane that Harper would defend the bill as "we won't enforce it so why worry?"
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
But here in the states with the limits on copyright duration, I don't know why the Supreme Court hasn't ruled DMCA and digital locks unconstitutional as it extends copyright to infinity. There are no provisions for placing all encryption keys into an escrow account to be released to the public on xyz date.
There are no provisions in the encryption methodology to turn off encryption after xyz date.
Current encryption methods used on all DVD and Blu-Ray devices are illegal due to how they extend copyright (based on DMCA or DMCA type laws).