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

From: mskala _-at-_ ansuz.sooke.bc.ca
To: No DMCA in Canada <canada-dmca-opponents (at) flora.org>
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2002 21:02:04 -0500 (EST)

On Sun, 10 Mar 2002, Chris Palmer wrote:
> 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,

Careful there - it's not clear to me that a "format copyright" exists
under current law, and I wouldn't want to encourage people to try claiming
one.  I don't think Corel has any privileges over documents in WordPerfect
format merely because they are in WordPerfect format.

> 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.

Under what law?  We don't have any DRM protection in Canada at the moment,
so your anti-DRM program is trivially legal; are you saying it would still
be legal under some specific proposed law?

[ISP liability]
> - no ISP's here so no one was deeply concerned

I think the "ISP liability" topic is a good chance to broach the question
of liability for *linking*, which is something that needs to be
resolved.  If there is illegal content on the Web (for any value of
"illegal" - it need not be DRM circumvention, it could be for instance
child pornography), then should it be illegal for me to post a link to it?

The US courts seem to want to make linking to illegal content also illegal
itself, but I really hope we won't go in that direction.  It's a question
that would have come up in my own cp4break case if that had made it to
Canadian court, because I was publishing (on a server in Canada) a link to
a server in Sweden where my co-author had posted the cp4break documents.

> people, against a legal requirement that there should be identification on a
> web site.

Yikes!

>  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

If ISP liability includes linking, then we're all ISPs...
-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                    Embrace and defend.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/

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