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On Sat, 12 Mar 2005, Christophe Beauregard wrote:

> DRM is pretty much entirely run by the private sector. Control by "foreign
> mega-corporations" plays pretty well.

   I'm not so convinced that this would be the case with a Conservative.

   Remember that the Conservative party is a merger between a wide variety 
of "conservatives".  The folks that were part of the PC party and the 
Reform party appear from an outsider like me to have little in common 
other than being slightly right-of-center and disliking the Liberals.

   They will be having a convention starting Thursday to try to pin 
down some of these policy ideas:

Convention 2005
Palais des congrès, Montréal, Québec
March 17-19, 2005
http://www.primestrategies.ca/conservative/

   There were some conservative candidates in the last election that 
gave us replies that might be useful to try to contact.  Does anyone 
already have contact?

Mike Murphy
CIPPIC replies: Ottawa Centre Conservative candidate
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/view/387

Jurij Klufas
CIPPIC replies: Parkdale--High Park Conservative candidate
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/view/357

   Are there Conservatives involved in this list that would be willing to 
help with this?  A short document offering a position on what we think a 
Conservative response should be might be very helpful.

  - personal control of technology
  - government hands-off private sector development of business models
    - government is poor at picking business models. Statutory/Compulsory 
or Extended licensing should be seen as an extreme situation only where 
there is a market failure that cannot be fixed.  This is *NOT* the case 
with either the private copying levy or the various proposals in the 
Heritage report. Creators in the relevant areas are moving to business 
models based on Open Access, Creative Commons, etc.
   - Cross-sector subsidization.  The rhetoric of taxing/regulating the
     High Tech sector to subsidize legacy content industries needs to be
     challenged.
     - $$ ##'s?  We need to offer some numbers comparing the claimed losses
       in the legacy content industries with the real losses that making
       technology protect those business models would cost the high tech
       sector.

...etc..

   You get the idea.  Anyone able to help on this?

> You probably could have expanded on this by discussing how DRM doesn't have
> a "special user" class.

   This gets into a whole area that we don't want to open up, which is the 
key escrow and "government back door" debate.  DRM is an extreme abuse of 
TPM's for privacy and authenticity, and there have been numerous proposals 
to give governments back-doors to TPMs.  While this back-door is really 
just a front-door for abusers, this is something even less understood by 
the layperson.

> If you _really_ want to rattle some chains, tell a story about DRM-protected
> child pornography that can't be _detected_, let alone _viewed_, by law
> enforcement. Because, after all, effective DRM works just as well for the
> "bad guys".

   This was the theme (not child porn, but abuses by copyright infringers) 
of one of the talks at last years Ottawa Linux Symposium.  The problem is 
that DRM is being abused to obfuscate copyright infringements, claiming 
that it is an anti-circumvention violation for the actual copyright holder 
to circumvent the DRM to verify the underlying code is infringing.

> Irrespective of personal stance on firearm control, I don't think anyone
> will disagree with the political power of the gun lobby. You don't have to
> agree with them or even ally with them in order to make use of some of that
> power.

   I just wish the "You will remove personal control of communications 
technology from my cold, dead hands" was understood as being far more 
important in the modern world to the protection of the rights that guns 
claimed to be at the founding of the US.

   I understand the underlying position of the gun lobby, just believe they 
are a few hundred years out of date and thus talk about the wrong 
technology ;-)

-- 
  Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
  http://www.digital-copyright.ca/blog/2 (My BLOG)
  Sign the Petition Users' Rights! http://digital-copyright.ca/petition/
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