p2pnet - rss feed: Canadian IT petition
p2pnet.net News:- As a result of a SlashDot story this morning on the Petition to protect Information Technology property rights, a comment was posted that worried about potential unintended consequences.
If our rules are sufficiently different that US companies have a hard time conducting business in the way that they choose to do it, many companies will just abandon the Canadian market, and we get nothing.
I offered the following as a response.
The language used is very specific to avoid the types of problems you have raised.
THEREFORE, your petitioners call upon Parliament to prohibit the application of a technical protection measure to a device without the informed consent of the owner of the device, and to prohibit the conditioning of the supply of content to the purchase or use of a device which has a technical measure applied to it. We further call upon Parliament to recognise the right of citizens to personally control their own communication devices, and to choose software based on their own personal criteria.
First, please remember that DRM isn’t “applied to content”, but something that is “applied to devices”. As long as Canadians are free to install whatever software they want on the hardware they own, even if US citizens are not, then what we have asked for is protected.
Content is encoded so that it is only interoperable with a subset of devices, but that is the extent to which DRM relates to content. All the controversy relating to DRM relates to the locking down of devices by people other than the owners of the devices, and the treatment of these owners as a threat that third parties (manufacturers of the devices) need to protect against.
The first part of our petition is a clear protection of property rights, and is accomplished in two ways. The first is to not have anti-circumvention legislation, which is the status-quo in Canada. There is no obligation for Canada to ratify the 1996 WIPO treaties, and it is largely foreign special interests (Major labels and studios, USTR, USPTO) that are calling for Canada to ratify these treaties.
This first part also suggests simple labelling requirements, in support of a free market, such that consumers will be able to tell before they purchase content whether it will be compatible with their hardware. The doesn’t say that companies can’t encrypt content to deliberately break interoperability (a “feature” of all DRM), but that if content is encrypted that it will be lawful for a Canadian to decode the content with the hardware/software of their choosing, and that the deliberately non-interoperable content require labelling. This is consistent with existing Canadian law, and the laws of many other countries, and is not radical at all.
The second part talking about “conditioning of the supply” is part of anti-trust or competition law in many countries, and is often called “tied selling”. This is also not radical at all. Again, content can be encoded, but citizens must be free to convert the files to a format compatible with the devices that they own.
There is no conflict in having Canadians being able to legally device shift their content regardless of any technology used to deliberately reduce interoperability, but US citizens not being able to. There are many laws where Canada and the USA is different. This is no different than the fact that in Canada copyright is only life+50 rather than life+70, meaning that Canadians have access to public domain works a full 20 years before citizens in the USA. This is no different than how Canada has crown copyright (The Canadian government is a massive copyright holder), but the US government more fairly releases government works directly into the public domain. US citizens also benefit from a comprehensive Fair Use regime, while Canadians only have a much more limited Fair Dealings regime.
The last sentence should be an obvious recognition of the property rights of owners of computing hardware. While I would prefer to have all citizens of all countries have their basic property rights protected, there is no harm for Canadians to have their rights protected even if the rights of people in other countries are not.
This isn’t a case of excessive regulation, given what we are proposing isn’t new regulation at all but the application of existing regulations, and objecting to radically new regulations against our rights.
Russell McOrmond - p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He’s also the CLUE policy coordinator.]
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January 30th, 2007 at 7:33 pm
Crown copyrights and limited fail dealing? I thought Canada actually had BETTER copyright laws than the US, especially since downloading infringing material is protected by the Canadian blank media levy. That’s just terrible.
PS: WIPO sucks. Copyrights should not last a lifetime, and no one should ever have to agree with the awful Berne Convention just to get into the WTO.