Industry Minister defends the Canadian DMCA

The latest episode of the TVOntario Search Engine podcast is an interview with Industry Minister Tony Clement, the Canadian minister who co-introduced the punishing new Canadian copyright law that contains even harsher restrictions against breaking "digital locks" than the US DMCA, a 12-year-old trainwreck of a law. Host Jesse Brown really does a good job here, getting Clement to squirm over the question of turning Canadians into crooks for breaking the locks on their own property.

At one point Clement says that Brown will be able to break digital locks whenever he needs to, because doing so for the purpose of making "ephemeral copies" by a "broadcaster" is protected. I think Clement is flat-out wrong here. Jesse isn't a broadcaster -- he's a "podcaster" (what WIPO calls a "webcaster") and the copies he makes are not "ephemeral" -- they endure forever as MP3s sent to hundreds of thousands of computers of his listeners.

What's more, even if Clement is right (and if he is, all Canadians need to do is start a podcast and they'll be exempted from the law!), there's still the law's ban on "trafficking" in lock-breaking software. Under Clement's conception of the bill, all a Canadian journalist needs to do to exercise her rights under the law is to write her own DRM-cracking software from scratch, and share it with no-one. Same goes for blind people, teachers, and others who have a limited right to break locks for their own purposes.

MP3 link

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Baldhead

Seems to me that the Minister in charge of this Bill really doesn’t grasp the implications of it.
Anonymous

Steady people, stop the ad hominem personal attacks. That’s the first sign of a failed argument.

Fight the bill, not the man.
- ian71
  
  Do you really think that people elected by Canadian citizens would go out of their way to write this bill on their own, in their own time, when they could be out being corporate whores in exchange for campaign donations… seriously, which Canada were you living in, again?
  
  this bill was written by Big Media. The same Big Media that many of us stopped supporting years ago when we found out just how shamelessly they rape artists in the name of corporate profit. They are irrelevant, and so is this bill.
Anonymous

Of course not. He didn’t write the bill. It was given to him by a member of the big media lobby.
putty

Given that this is the same Tony Clement who was a participant of the Mike Harris cabinet, it comes as no surprise that he continues to be a corperate whore and an utterly ignorant asshole.
k88dad

To date, has the US DMCA been challenged in a court case? It seems blatantly unconstitutional and in direct opposition to established law on fair use.
- sloverlord
  
  The DMCA is stupid, but “stupid” does not necessarily mean “unconstitutional”. The ACLU filed a suit in 2002 alleging that it violated first amendment rights, but the courts dismissed that case. None of the other court challenges to the DMCA have been on constitutional grounds, AFAIK.
DarthVain

Tony Clement isn’t an idiot. Being an idiot presumes cognitive processes of ones own, even if diminutive. Tony Clement is Harper’s hand puppet, which is why he has a Ministerial post in the first place. He just repeats words given to him. I doubt he understands any further than the mouthing of syllables. So more accurately he is vacuously empty puppet.
rrh

Here’s the relevant section in the old act:
http://laws.justice.gc.ca/eng/C-42/page-3.html#codese:29

Here’s the changes they’re proposing to make:
http://www2.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?DocId=4580265&Mode=1&Language=E&File=42

I may have misunderstood before, or I might misunderstand now, but it seems to me that the digital locks restriction is being applied to 29.21 to 29.24, which would cover stuff like backup copies, format shifting, and recording stuff to view later, all for private use. But it isn’t being applied to 29.1 which deals with criticism and review.

So I think Clement is correct in saying the digital locks restriction wouldn’t apply to Brown. On the down side, the people who make the ripping software or other tools that Brown would need to break a digital lock might still be targeted.
- Ugly Canuck
  
  “Might”?
  
  What seems clear to me, is that the lock-makers are not so “mighty”, under the present law.
  - rrh
    
    Yeah, do you know see which part of the act addresses the tool-makers? Once I find that, maybe I can say something more specific than “might.”
ArghMonkey

All these people that don’t understand technology, when are we going to toss out these idiots?

This just makes me sick but I look forward to breaking these rules as much as possible and helping others to break them too.
the_headless_rabbit

Tony Clement needs to be fired.

From a cannon.
- ian71
  
  Hear Hear!
  Also, that’s really funny. :)