Digital Copyright Canada

Russell McOrmond wrote:

> The following is a draft article posted at 
> http://www.flora.ca/russell/drafts/drm-abuse.html
> 
>   Peer review and feedback greatly appreciated.  I will then look for
> media outlets who wish to publish this, or use it for future articles.
> 
>    This  is DRAFT. It will later be published to the [1]Digital Copyright
>    Canada website.
> 
>                   Abuses of Digital Rights Management (DRM).
> 
>    [2]Canadian  New  Media  has  an  article indicating that "Newly-named
>    Parliamentary  secretary  to the minister of Canadian Heritage Sarmite
>    Bulte   says   implementation   of  the  World  Intellectual  Property
>    Organization  (WIPO)  Internet  treaties stands an excellent chance of
>    being  one of the first pieces of legislation passed by a new minority
>    Liberal  government."  Last  week  I  was  also at the [3]Ottawa Linux
>    Symposium what had a Birds of a Feather (BOF) talk on [4]violations of
>    the GNU General Public License, the copyright license that Linux uses.

I would omit the last sentence. The piece flows better without it.

>    Given the speed at which Ms. Bulte wishes to ratify treaties that were
>    poorly  researched  and should never have been authored and signed, we
>    need to keep the heat on policy makers so that they can understand the
>    unintended  consequences of this policy.

I would also tone that down a lot.

	These treaties are obviously dubious and appear to be an attempt
	to extend flawed US law worlwdide.

> These treaties were signed in
>    1996  at  a  time  when  most policy makers knew very little about the
>    Internet.
> 
>    In the support of legal protection for DRM there is a false assumption
>    that  DRM will only be used by copyright holders to protect works that
>    they  have  created.

This is historically innacurate. Movie and record companies have a long
history of trying to impose excessive, even illegal, controls on users.
In their hands, it is not "Digital Rights Management" but digital access
control, often including forbidding legitmate access:

For example, movie companies sued Sony claiming Betamax VCRs were tools
for violating copyright. They took this all the way to the US Supreme
Court and lost.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=464&invol=417

The Court ruled that time-shifting was fair use.

 From Phil Karn's web page:
http://people.qualcomm.com/karn/quotes.html

     "The growing and dangerous intrusion of this new technology
     threatens an entire industry's economic vitality and future
     security. [The new technology] is to the American film producer
     and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman
     alone

     Jack Valenti, President, Motion Picture Association of America,
     testifying on videocassette recorders before the House Judiciary
     Committee in 1982."

Valenti is now an advocate of DMCA, still using apocalyptic rhetoric. 
Methinks this quote clearly demonstrates he should not be taken seriously.

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Digital Copyright Canada

Re: [d@DCC] Abuses of Digital Rights Management (DRM) (DRAFT article)

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