People often complain that Canadian copyright law is out of date and that we need a stricter law to protect the artists.
I’d just like to turn to one particularly controversial topic on copyright law today: provisions against the circumvention of DRM (digital locks). With the Copyright Consultation that is currently going on in Canada, that has been pegged as the issue that has seen the most opposition from Canadians thus far.
Bill C-61 (aka the “Canadian DMCA“) may have died, but the digital locks issue is not going away any time soon, because of a particular provision in the WIPO Copyright Treaty (Article 11), signed by Canada, that states:
Contracting Parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty or the Berne Convention and that restrict acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law.
The treaty was ratified by the United States in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) back in 1998. As it stands now, the DMCA makes it illegal for consumers to, for example, remove the encryption on a DVD they have legally purchased so that they can play the video on a portable player. To protect the artists, indeed. I think it’s quite clear who this law benefits.
How important should it be to for Canada to follow through on its treaty obligations, even when so many people have spoken against them? In the case of the WIPO Copyright Treaty, fewer than 50% of countries have ratified it. Is this a simple matter of “the law is the law”, or should more flexibility be afforded here?
Cross-posted from Trials and Tribulations
In Canada, the CCH decision poses problems for DRM measures insofar as DRM measures make no allowances for fair dealing.
I am of the opinion that “the law is the law” is an absurd approach given the complexities that copyright must accommodate. The goal of DRM measures is to protect a business model — distributors (and VERY successful creators) of big-budget commercial works (the prime beneficiaries of copyright law) seek to prevent people from consuming their products without paying for them. Unfortunately copyright law affects so many other activities beyond the consumption of commercial works for entertainment purposes that this causes enormous problems for libraries, education institutions and non-commercial artists, among others. The law needs to be flexible and very sophisticated to properly accommodate the varies stakeholders’ interests.
The notion that a legally purchased DVD will only work on a DVD player isn’t really a large concern to me. That distributors are disrespecting the purchasers of their wares is something that the marketplace will likely resolve, and is not a matter that the law should be concerned with, in my opinion. The distributors should be permitted to sell their products to consumers on terms that the consumers are willing to accept. Note that Apple wanted to permit free copying of files sold on i-tunes. It was the distributors that insisted on the copy-prevention mechanisms. Apple (and the consumer) prevailed in the end.
The law should be concerned with the affects that the regime has on creativity, culture and the sharing of ideas. The rest is up to the marketplace.