Industry Minister Jim Prentice — who has consistently dodged direct questions about his proposed Canadian DMCA — is doing a live appearance at the Calgary Stampede this coming Saturday.
Here's how Prentice's version of the CDMCA spin works: "The Canadian DMCA is a balance. It guarantees a whole bunch of consumer rights, like time-shifting and format-shifting." But you also criminalize breaking DRM, even when it takes away those "guaranteed" rights. "Yes, but no one would use DRM to take those away." But people have. "The market will solve it."
Minister Prentice has apparently never heard of what economists call Moral Hazard: "the prospect that a party insulated from risk may behave differently from the way it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk." In other words: if you give the entertainment industry a tool by which they can ban time-shifting, format-shifting, etc, and charge extra for the "privilege" of exercising those "rights," then they probably will.
Are you near Calgary? Planning on going to the Stampede? Maybe you could find Minister Prentice — preferably while holding a video camera — and ask him about this.
(Thanks, RajSmith!)
