Re: [Cdn-DMCA] Effect of the Supreme Court Ruling on American Satellite on the Copyright issue

From: Russell McOrmond <russell _-at-_ flora.ca>
To: No DMCA in Canada <canada-dmca-opponents (at) flora.org>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2002 19:23:17 -0400 (EDT)

On Mon, 29 Apr 2002, Michael Geist wrote:

> With respect, I think the criticism in this case is best placed at 
> the government's feet, not the Supreme Court.  The Court was simply 
> interpreting the law 

  Thank you for posting this reminder.  Sometimes with all this talk of
"Judicial Activism" there is some claim that the courts, and not the
government, are making the laws.


  The Courts should be better understood by the technical community as a
more advanced CPU.  This CPU may not execute the code the same way every 
time, but that is because it has different external inputs each time (Each 
court case is 'executed' in a different time with different 
events/precedent, etc).

  You don't blame the CPU when a computer crashes, you blame the software.  
In this case the software is our (very buggy) laws, and a considerable
amount of debugging is needed.  Sometimes you WANT the system to
crash-and-burn, and so so visibly so that people will become aware of the
problem and work to fix it!


  Will this issue get some media and public attention?  Will that 
attention turn into voter activism?  We will need some "for average 
Canadian Citizens" things in our PAC.

  I know it will change the minds of those who felt that Heritage was
going to be our best hope on getting good interpretations of copyright
issues.  The Copyright policy branch might be great folks, the the
Minister is the one with the power.

  I'm continuing with Industry as well.  I had a great meeting today with
the ICT group (formed from people from a variety of branches in Industry
Canada).  I have a future meeting with the ICT branch themselves Friday
after next.  They are very interested in discussing the interoperability
concerns relating to legal protection of TPM.  It seems this issue wasn't
brought up as an "issue" with digital copyright.  They do see an irony in
the regulation of Telecommunications to mandate standardization, and yet
there is a huge potential threat to ICT interoperability within the
digital copyright proposals.

---
 Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
 See http://weblog.flora.ca/ for announcements, activities, and opinions
 Read the speech on copyright made in 1841 by Thomas Babbington Macaulay -
 a must-read for creators -even predicted the consumer reaction to Napster

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