Digital Copyright Canada

Copy to my MP so that he will be aware of this non-response from Industry
Canada, as well as my summary of our visit.  I have not yet received
anything from my complaint which was in relation to a different violation
of the Canadian Competition act.

On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Tom A. Trottier wrote:
  http://www.flora.org/dmca/forum/168

>  Hi, I got this message from Industry Canada on the DVD monopoly complaint: 
> (excuse the poor scanning...)

  This is what I was worried about.  Since we are in the same region as
the USA, and the cartel is based primarily out of the USA, then the
region-encoding would not be understood in a Canadian context as
anti-competitive.  This is an argument that will need to be made primarily
outside of zone 1 given that Canada isn't taking into consideration that
there woult be trade in CD's between other than the origional encoder and
the final consumer.

  This is why I believe we need to focus on the second issue, which is the
tied-selling of CSS encoded CVD videos to DVD-CSS licenced video players.
The DVD-CSS has only two purposes at this point which is to limit the
inter-regional trading of CD's and to control the DVD player market.  I
believe in Canada we must focus on that second issue, specifically as it
relates to the treatment of Open Source/Free Software based DVD players as
illegal "anti circumvention devices".

  We need to remember that Canada doesn't really have a government-side
advocate for consumers.  Consumer and corporate affairs became Industry
Canada, and this totally changed the political landscape such that the
interests of big-Industry are promoted, but the interests of consumers are
simply not protected.  Those of us that want to continue the Copyright vs
Competition debate beyond the reform process will find out heads up
against this problem all the time.

Meeting with MP
---------------

  In my meeting with my MP on Thursday we spoke about these issues.  The
key things I got from the meeting were:

  a) The political aspects of the lack of a separate Consumer Affairs
department in the Canadian government.  Having competition and consumer
affairs handled by Industry Canada is an conflict of interest.

  b) In Canada the Copyright issue is a dual/duel-responsibility between
Industry Canada and Heritage Canada.  Heritage will focus on artists,
while Industry will focus on publishers.  He believed we should do what we
can to encourage Heritage to take as large a roll as possible in this
process as our interests are closer to those of traditional artists than
of the Industrial publishers.

  I noted there will be nobody at the table focused on the new third
constituency, users/citizens, and that this may be something we should be
pushing for as well.  As publishers work to try to move copyright from
being a regulation of publishers by authors to being a regulation on
citizens by publishers, we need to have someone working on citizens
behalf.

  c) Mr Mauril Bélanger was active during the last copyright process, so
may be quite willing to get involved in this one.

  Our discussions indicated that we didn't yet share ideas on "the right
to compatibility" in a software/computing free market (IE:
reverse-engineering and circumvention devices), but that would be an
appropriate topic for a later meeting.  It should be understood by us that
an MP is not going to have spent as much time thinking about
new-economies, copyright-vs-competition and other such things as we have.

  d) I also spoke about Bill C-287 which was the mandatory GMO labelling
bill that failed the day before, but which Mr Bélanger supported.  I
wanted to bring this up to discuss the whole area of consumer protection
in Canada.

For the curious, here was my agenda.
----------------------------------------------------

Agenda		                                October 18, 2001

             *High Tech consumer choice, competition*
                 *and fair government procurement*

  The purpose of this meeting is to identify areas of common interest, and
to contemplate strategies for moving forward related public policies.

Bill C-287
	- Now-dead bill was not ideal, but was a step in the right
          direction.
	- We need consumer protection laws which mandate labelling on all
          controversial ingredients or manufacturing techniques that meet
	  a certain threshold for controversy or health (allergies)

Copyright reform
   Delicate balance between a number of different interests

	- Charter rights vs economic public policy
	- Authors, Publishers and the general public
	- traditional property-based business models and newer services
	  based models
	- potentially incompatible public policy initiatives such as
	  GDP-style growth vs Free Market competition

Fair Government procurement
	- Existing CITT cases with P&L Communications indicates a
	  willingness of government bureaucrats to fight against fair
	  government procurement.

Microsoft
	- European Commission, 19 states of the United States, the
	  District of Columbia and the Department of Justice in the United
	  States have each investigated Microsoft.
	- Where is Canada?  Letters written to Minister Brian Tobin or the
	  competition bureau have met with replies asking ?what
	  anti-competitive practices??

DVD-CCA
	- If Canadian Copyright is extended to protecting access rights
	  such as was done in the USA with the DMCA, then this will cause
	  conflict between specific businesses and Canada's Competition
	  act
	- The DVD-CCA (Copy Control Association) licenses a technology
	  called DVD-CSS (Content Scrambling System). DVD-CCA is primarily
	  made up of the largest movie publishers.
	- Software which implements CSS is protected by the US DMCA as a
	  "circumvention device".  In order to play CD's on my own home
	  computer running Free Software (Linux) I needed to make use of a
	  tool called DeCSS which is illegal to publish or even link-to in
	  the United States.
	- DVD-CSS is unrelated to the ability to copy a CD, and is a
	  technology used to control the video-player market as well as
	  the International trade in CDs.
	- Requiring a DVD-CCA cartel endorsed player in order to play a
	  DVD-CCA cartel published movie is a case of "tied selling" under
	  Canada's Competition Act.
	- Regional codes unduly restrict the trade of CCS-encoded CDs and
	  could potentially also be a violation of the Competition Act.

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Digital Copyright Canada

DVD-CCA cartel complaint and MP meeting.

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