Digital Copyright Canada

I was to the meeting in Halifax.

There was about 25 persons there, four were from Heritage Canada / Industry
Canada , one facilitator, one recorder.

Of the remaining twenty or so, at least half were from various provincial
education departments, concerned about how copyright would affect education.

One from Actra, the actors union, concerned with how actors and musicians
etc would get paid.

One from the Canadian Copyright Collective, representing print authors; I
think there was a second that had a similar job.

One university law professor, from a "Law and Technology Group" or some
similar name at Dalhousie.

One from the MicroElectronics department at University Cape Breton

One computer science student (Dalhousie)

Me (I introduce myself as a computer programmer).

I saw one person from McInness Cooper, a local law firm, but he never spoke.

Perhaps half took active part in the proceedings, most  just took notes. No
I didn't dominate the discussion as the below may indicate, I just remember
better what I said.

The proceedings were very polite, I think Heritage Canada was hoping for a
rehearsal in easy surroundings before the fur flies in Vancouver.

I found the Heritage Canada people to be very competent, they knew the
issues, they even read slashdot. They are trying to find out your
opinions.( I will call them HC to avoid being too long)

They are trying to restrict the discussion to the four main questions, they
will steer you away from long speeches on the evils of DMCA and SSSCA.

1. Making available right

Nobody quite understood the question, so we all went off on our hobbyhorses.
Educators were concerned about continuing access to copyrighted materials,
even with all the license fees they pay now.  They are concerned about
access and use of materials received from the internet.

Actra was concerned about how performers would be paid, specific example of
someone he knew who just issued a CD.

The fellow from the Microelectronics Group talked about his preferred
operating system (Linux), open source, the problems of trying to put copy
protection into hard drives and the problems of grandfathering electronics
to handle older protection techniques.  Academic concerns, most academics in
his field preferred Linux.Quite a good discussion, I am too brief here.

The copyright collective was concerned about authors rights.

Computer science student said a problem was not copying but access controls
on data.

Me - I talked about it from a  computer programmers perspective - data is
data is data, bits are bits. Some problems I brought up is that the law
makes a distinction between audio recordings "phonograms" and video
recordings, but computer programs do not, they are just different sorts of
files. I posed the question of whether If I put a lenscap on the camcorder,
is this still a video file or become a phonogram, people will use whichever
law is better for them. (They hemmed and hawed on that one, maybe a video
file is a video file even if the video part is blank...)

I said that I thought that lawyers went overboard on the concept of copying,
that copying is inherent in how a computer works. It was as if I paid $20
for a book, but a $10 license fee to read (copy to brain), this was how
absurd a lot of legal comments seem.

(In talks during coffee break, one HC said that he had conversations with
engineers from Sony over how much of a buffer is needed for video from
Firewire, apparently some Mac's need little or none. It appears that one of
the awkward questions is: when is a copy just a temporary, technical copy
required for the computer to function, or for internet routing,  when is it
a copy to which copyright act applies? Is a buffer - a temporary copy -
needed to function? If so how large can the buffer be before it becomes a
"copy"? How small can a copy be before it ceases to be a buffer: (I argued
that one byte was still a buffer...).)

Another point   is that the write-up seems to assume one file (music,
video,book) one author; there are multiple rights in most files. I.E. Corel
has copyright in format of Wordperfect files, HC copyright in contents. Gave
example of  genealogy files, these often have a format copyright,
uncopyrightable facts, clippings from newspapers, photos, life stories
(original composition) etc done by hundreds of authors about thousands of
people wrapped up into one file. Mixed rights files do not seem to have been
considered.

Something that I am concerned about is the nature of libraries in the
future, when libraries will distribute books over the internet. Or things
like the National Geographic CD set with 100 years on CD. That is the
obvious way to distribute archival copies of magazines. Also there are many
books that were printed say fifty years ago and the author can no longer be
found, how can these be scanned and made available? The attitude of the
Actra guy and the copyright collective is "That's tough, if you can't find
the author its better that the book rots for a hundred years and is lost."
(Note - there is a way out when the author cannot be found, royalties can be
agreed on and put in escrow if heirs are ever found.)

Considering that today's kids never enter a library, I think it will be scan
or die for the eighty years of books between public domain and the net.

2. Legal protection of technological Measures.

- I am not sure when the discussion turned from Item 1 to Item 2

- Education was concerned that if archives had right to copy books from rot,
he should have right to protect computer files from Bitrot

- objected to any sort of tracking system of what people were reading

- HC seem to consider access control an entirely different subject from
copyright. In particular, one of them told me that I can read any data file
with the program of my choosing, including a hex dump program, this is not
part of copyright....

- An example I gave was this: I write a program to read the new pmp3
"protected mp3" file.  In this program I read a header with a "protect" flag
or an expiry date. My program pops a little dialog box "You do not have the
right to play this file. Do you wish to play this file (Buttons) Yes/ No".

Is it legal for me to write this program? By putting the buttons on so the
user makes the decision is the illegal act committed by the user who presses
the button, not the programmer?

No clear answer, but they did mark that one down. From comments,I suspect
the program was legal.

Some discussion of the bad business plan aspect, rights management just
harms the legitimate user while no obstacle to the bad guys, reminder of
1980 computer software, copy protection did not work.

3. Legal protection of rights management -

- this question overlapped the previous  a bit too much.

- for example, my protected mps program might overwrite the pmp3 expiry date
would that be legal? Does it matter if I can read the file with any program?

- Good comment from the Actra fellow that they would use the DRM info to
track sales and the royalties their members should get - someone might hack
the info to change the name of the performer so the wrong person would get
royalties.

- great deal of concern from Educators that data can be changed so easily so
inadvertently that they could be charged, possibly criminally, for
inadvertent errors.

4 Liability of network intermediaries

- no ISP's here so no one was deeply concerned

- Law professor said that this was settled already in common law, that ISP's
were similar to distributors. A bookstore only knows the titles of its
books, not the contents, so it has no liability until advised of contents.

- Educators concerned about taking down really gross sites that their
students created, often couldn't track down where a web site was or who was
responsible. Some talk of "Whois" and using IP addresses to track down
people, against a legal requirement that there should be identification on a
web site.

- Also talk of an arbitration panel to decide whether a site should be taken
down, much cheaper and quicker than litigation.

-------------

Ok, that was the gist of it.

I was talking to the girl from copyright collective when I was leaving, she
was saying that the discussion  was biased towards "users" and away from the
creators.

 It occurred to me after that this was not entirely the case, on the
internet everyone is both creator and user. Actually I think that the
problem is that the law tends to make distinctions (creator and consumer,
audio and video, copy and use of copy...) that computer systems do not.

Anyway, enough typing, that's enough for now I may think of something else
later. Questions may refresh my memory.

Main point: stick to their questions and try to answer them. Also, assume
they are competent,  know exactly what the DMCA and SSSCA are, and even read
slashdot.

Chris

----- Original Message -----
From: <mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca>
To: "No DMCA in Canada" <canada-dmca-opponents@flora.org>
Sent: March 9, 2002 2:50 PM
Subject: [Cdn-DMCA] What happened in Halifax?

> Do we know of anyone who actually went to the Halifax consultation meeting
> yesterday?  I have one contact in Nova Scotia who wasn't able to make it,
> partly because of the short notice.  I sure hope somebody on our side of
> the issues got to be there.
> --
> Matthew Skala
> mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                    Embrace and defend.
> http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/
>
> --
> For (un)subscription information, posting guidelines and
> links to other related sites please see http://www.flora.org/dmca/
>

--
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Digital Copyright Canada

Re: [Cdn-DMCA] What happened in Halifax?

All Canadian Citizens are "Rights Holders"!