Canada's DMCA coming in this spring?

Word is that the Canadian government will bring down a new copyright law this spring. The proposal is meant to be similar to the terrible Bill C60 that the last government proposed (and didn't manage to enact), but even worse, with harsher "anti-circumvention" rules.

"Anti-circumvention" is the idea that it should be illegal to access the stuff you buy, using your own computers and other players, if the person who sold it to you has put some kind of anti-copying technology in place.

This is a feature in the US's disastrous 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law that has done nothing to stop copying or enrich artists, but which has hurt competition, free speech, due process rights, and security research, and even sent an engineer to jail because he talked about the wrong kind of math.

When America created the DMCA, they didn't have any other examples to look to to see if it would work or not. Canada doesn't have this excuse. The DMCA is nearly 10 years old and has yet to accomplish any of its nominal objectives.

Canada has no excuse for considering this kind of dumb law. It will hurt Canada's ability to self-determine (Canadian material locked up with US locks can't be unlocked by Canadians without permission from American companies), will hurt Canadian artists (legitimate customers turn to piracy when they can't use the media they bought), hurt Canadian businesses (anti-circumvention makes it illegal to create products that are compatible with locked media), and hurt Canadian research.

Who will oppose the bill? For starters:

* creator groups, such as the CMCC, Appropriation Art, the Documentary Organization of Canada, all of whom have emphasized the need for fair dealing reform, not DRM
* copyright collectives, for whom anti-circumvention is a secondary issue and the educational exception will be viewed as a complete betrayal
* the Quebec copyright and education communities, which has come out against the educational exception at both the ministerial and cultural levels
* the broader education and library communities, who (apart from CMEC and AUCC who have spent years lobbying for the educational exception) recognize that the reform does little to address their real needs
* the retail community, who hoped the government would address private copying (as promised in its copyright policy position)
* broadcasters, who hoped the government would address the ephemeral rights issue
* the privacy community, who will fear that the legal protections for DRM will damage privacy rights
* consumer groups, who will note that anti-circumvention legislation has already had a negative impact on basic consumer interests in Europe and the United States
* the Canadian public, who will wonder why it is still unlawful to copy music onto an iPod or record a television show or a create a parody on YouTube
* the NDP
* possibly the Liberals, who will jump at the opportunity to promote their C-60 bill as a better bill
* possibly the Bloc, who will be unwilling to support a bill that includes the educational exception

Link

(Thanks, C Smith!)