The new Canadian DMCA would be great if it didn’t suck. It has specific inclusions to protect parody and satire, protects time and place shift, and does a lot of other great stuff. Except it won’t let you break a digital lock put on content from stopping you from exercising the very rights the bill gave you. With this provision in place you’ll never enjoy your gadgets and gear quite as much, ever again. It has to go.
This is the third time that the Canadian government has tried to appease American content industry lobbyists with made-to-order legislation. It’s the closest they’ve gotten to actually producing a bill that actually helps everyone… except for the digital locks provision. All of the rights given to Canadians have gone out the window thanks to the inability to break digital locks.
Borrow a digital book from the library? It blows up in five days. Take distance ed? Your digital materials evaporate 30 days after the course is over. Does this make sense to you?
The Bill makes allowances for place and time shifting – but all of that is completely moot if the content is locked up tight. Do you make copies of DVDs because your kids have a tendency to scratch them? Under Bill C-32 you’ve just broken the law and you could be on the hook for up to $5000 a disc. I have a 600 movie library full of CSS digitally locked DVDs, every single one of them ripped to my media server (I still own the discs, naturally). If you think that’s work THREE MILLION DOLLARS you need your head checked. This provision MUST GO.
If you like to stream cool media and have more fun with the stuff you own YOU MUST contact your MP now. Join the Fair Copyright for Canada group on Facebook, read Michael Geist’s blog, and make your opinion known. We can stop this, now, before American interests claim ownership of things within our home.
This is because this isn’t a copyright law, it’s a profit protection law. It doesn’t concern itself with the content of digital media, it concerns itself only with the digital commodity. It’s not enough that corporations like Sony and Apple make money of the consumption of digital media, they want to maximize profits by controlling consumer behaviour (i.e. what you can do with the media you’ve purchased). This is not about who owns content, this is about who controls product. If this law is to protect corporate rights, it must also protect the rights of those being subjugated by it (i.e. the consumer). Otherwise, it isn’t a law. It’s a decree.