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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."
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.
At least give attribution to the summary, lifted in its entirety from Michael Geist's blog:
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6544/125/
The original post also gives a great breakdown of the specific policies that will change under this new legislation.
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
When this argument was brought up during the last attempt to pass this legislation, it was said that "effective" doesn't necessarily mean that it "works well" in this context, just that protection is "in effect" (no matter how ineffective the protection actually is). IANAL, but I believe that distinction was made by one and if I had any clue where I read that, I'd link to it.
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).
Here is the direct link to the bill. It is in lawyer / legislative speak, but (as you alluded to) says nothing about effective.