Canadians Battling Proposed Canadian DMCA 202
An anonymous reader writes "CTV reports on how Canadians are fighting back against the Canadian DMCA. Led by Michael Geist, the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group is nearing 90,000 members. There are local chapters, a YouTube contest, wikis, and people writing letters and organizing rallies against the copyright bill. Geist said, 'When you get tens of thousands of Canadians speaking out like this, there's big political risk for any political party who chooses to ignore it.'"
its for their own good (Score:4, Informative)
The government will just ignore them and do what they want, as the people are too stupid to know what is right.
( yes thats sarcasm, but its also what the 'man' will do if given a chance )
Re:No conspiracy theory here (Score:4, Informative)
My MP is ignoring it... (Score:4, Informative)
I've written a couple of emails and talked to his office manager about the issue and asked why the Liberal party is not making this a confidence motion. It's bad legislation and bad for the country.
For anybody else in Etobicoke-Lakeshore (Toronto South-West), please drop a line to Michael Ignatieff [michaelignatieff.ca] and let him know what you think.
Thanx,
myke
Re:Political Repurcussions (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, the wiki article on the DMCA says "Passed on October 12, 1998 by a unanimous vote in the U.S. Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 28, 1998" so I must have been mistaken. I thought I had heard something around the time of the MPAA vs 2600 case, but apparently not.
Re:No conspiracy theory here (Score:3, Informative)
sail through Canada's legislative process...
I think you're overestimating the Canadian legislative process, since the Bill itself will be set onto the back burner for maybe the next year or so before actually passing, assuming the government doesn't dissolve into another election and will have to be backburner'd indefinitely. There was almost a couple of times just this summer a Vote of no confidence was brought up.
Liberal and Conservative are indeed the two dominant parties, but they must try their best to cater to voters from other parties (like a Bloc Quebecois supporter who votes for PC while waiting for Bloc to get more power). This is really counter-intuitive, but it's literally impossible to pigeonhole Canadians into two groups, and the both the liberals and conservatives need support of non-party supporters, otherwise they won't get a majority government. (By contrast, PC currently has a minority government, meaning that they've won less than half of the seats available during the last election). Please correct me if I messed up one of these details above, but that's basically federal party politics in summary.
The whole technology and corporations thing isn't as cut and dried as that either. For example, Sony is somewhat opposed to this, since details of the Bill-C61 will means less sales of their DivX television player. But at the same time, Sony represents many label whose interests may be protected by the Bill. So Sony's been mostly passive. Microsoft, on the other hand, is basically threatening to lay off a bunch of workers in Canada, since it's not in their interest to operate as heavily here.
I'm opposed to the bill myself, but I'm optimistic that it will be shut down, maybe occasionally to be rewritten and rear its ugly head again.
Re:No conspiracy theory here (Score:5, Informative)
Actually in Canada the official opposition (Liberals) and our left-wing party (NDP) have come out in opposition to this bill.
That doesn't mean that the Liberals will vote against it. They may sit on their hands or run away as they have for past votes. Perhaps a historian of Canadian politics could say whether there was ever a wimpier opposition. I doubt it.
Re:No Worries (Score:5, Informative)
Really? We didn't even break through 70% of eligible voters showing up in the last election. In some parts of the country it was a lot less. Maybe Canadians are slightly less apathetic than their US counterparts, but only slightly.
Re:No conspiracy theory here (Score:3, Informative)
Canada is a democracy (Score:5, Informative)
If Canadian politicians don't respond to the wishes of their constituents, they have the option of replacing them. The current ruling party, for example, is only about 20 years old.
It's not comparable to the US system where Democrats have a monopoly on the left and Republicans on the right.
Re:No conspiracy theory here (Score:3, Informative)
With the way that the Tories and Libs are both gearing up for fall elections, we might just end up being lucky and seeing a far more reasonable bill show up in the 40th legislature.
Re:No Worries (Score:5, Informative)
1. William Davis, Tory premier of Ontario, who after giving full funding to Catholic schools, was tossed out of office after 40 years of consecutive Conservative rule.
2. Brian Mulroney, Ronny Reagans buddy, after introducing the Gouge and Screw Tax, had his MAJORITY government reduced to 2 seats in the next election.
These tories have been warned, enact this legislation and they will be destroyed politically. Harper won't be able to run for village mayor after we're through with him.
Re:My MP is ignoring it... (Score:3, Informative)
You should. And don't just write, but phone and email and while the House is out, visit the constituency office even without an appointment. Get on Harper's ass about it.
It might not do much, but you'll feel better, and he might actually have second thoughts if he's planning to make it a confidence issue or otherwise gun it through Commons.
Re:My MP is ignoring it... (Score:3, Informative)
Three critical steps:
1. Reply, pointing out that their standard form letter is full of lies and half-truths (maybe point out a few of them.)
2. Send copies of the letter to the NDP and Liberal candidates in your riding (or the head of their parties if you don't know who they are.)
3. BE VERY BLUNT AND LET HARPER KNOW YOU'RE CC'ING THE OTHERS.
The third part is the most important - it makes it much harder for him to ignore you if other people who want his job are aware they have something to attack him with.
Re:Canada is a democracy (Score:3, Informative)
The current Governing party, the Conservative Party of Canada, is only fiver years old.
The Progressive Conservative party and the Canadian Alliance merged in October of 2003.
Re:My MP is ignoring it... (Score:3, Informative)
Thank you (and the others who replied) for your encouragement. Here is my reply letter:
The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6
Re: Bill C-61
Hello Mr. Harper,
I had written you last month to voice my concerns about bill C-61, and inform you that I was not in agreement with it as currently constituted. I have just received a standard form-letter reply to my initial letter, listing all of the 'benefits' which are to be included with this new proposed law, and how it is "made-in-Canada" with all sorts of benefits to Canadians.
You have obviously either missed my point, or chose to ignore it. I was not requesting propaganda on this bill - I was writing to inform you (as my representative) of my opinion. To re-state the major point in my previous letter, the most important of my concerns is included here.
The major loophole which you have managed to include in the bill, but which you continually ignore in all your official propaganda, is the DRM exception: if any copyright holder includes any digital rights management on the content, all your rights as a consumer, which this bill would give you, are void. To quote Michael Geist: "The Canadian DMCA allows every single exception to copyright to be eliminated by adding DRM: whatever the law allows you to do, a corporation can take away, just by using DRM to prevent you from doing it. Breaking DRM is illegal, unless you fit into a tiny, narrow, useless exception for security research."
Let me reiterate on this point: I am opposed to bill C-61, and I refuse to vote for any politician who supports it. If you and your party continue to bring forward and support bills of this nature, you will lose yet another voter from the "Conservative West".
I am copying this letter to my local, non-Conservative MPs, as well as the heads of the opposition parties, in the hope that they will encourage their parties fulfill their responsibilities, and oppose such blatant disregard of the wishes of their constituents.
Respectfully Yours,
<signed>
Re:Canada is a democracy (Score:5, Informative)
The Reform Party was founded in 1987. Sure, they change their name every 5 years or so, but still.
That's a rather wide definition of "merged" (Score:3, Informative)
It would be more accurate to say the Progressive Conservative Party was purchased by the Reform Party, which was founded in 1987.
To quote the Letter the Parent Linked: (Score:4, Informative)
Liberal MP Marlene Jennings, who serves as the party's deputy house leader, has been sending the following letter to concerned constituents about Bill C-61. The letter, which is the most substantive that I have seen, is posted in its entirety with permission.
Thank you for your letter concerning Bill C-61, An Act to amend the Copyright Act. Over the last few months I have made a concerted effort to better inform myself of all of the issues associated with copyright reform in Canada. In this vein, I joined the Intellectual Property (IP), Anti-Counterfeiting and Anti-Piracy Parliamentary Caucus. Through the meetings and consultations held by this group I came to the conclusion that reform of our copyright legislation will, I hope, have the following principles at its core:
1) Anti-circumvention measures and penalties must be linked to the efforts of those who violate copyright for commercial purposes, and not just the technology itself;
2) Provisions for flexible fair dealing. Fair dealing creates a limited number of exceptions, including private study, research, criticism, review and news reporting to charges of infringement.
3) It would also incorporate a fair and well defined 'notice and notice' system, which involves a notification from a copyright holder - often involving movies, software or music - claiming that a subscriber has made available or downloaded content without authorization on file sharing systems. The Internet Service Provider forwards the notification to the subscriber but takes no other action - it does not pass along the subscriber's personal information, remove the content from its system, or cancel the subscriber's service. It falls to the subscriber to remove the infringing content (if indeed it is infringing) voluntarily.
In assessing the degree to which Bill C-61 incorporated these basic principles, I compared it with the previous Liberal government's proposed copyright Bill - Bill C-60 - which was introduced in June of 2005. Bill C-61 incorporates the same 'notice and notice' requirements as Bill C-60.
Though C-61 appears to offer more flexibility on fair dealing, in banning circumvention technology the means to legitimately copy or change formats is torn from the hands of legitimate users. Thus, the section of the bill banning legitimate anti-circumvention technology needs to be eliminated and replaced with something that experts in the field would feel is more appropriate in allowing a greater deal of flexibility in fair dealing. I hope that these changes will be developed during the committee's study of the bill.
In Bill C-60 (clause 27, new subsection 34.02(1)) anti-circumvention penalties required that circumvention be for the commercial purpose of infringing copyright, for example reproduction or communication of the work, whereas Bill C-61 (clause 31-new subsection 41.1(1)) prohibits circumvention in general and does not require infringement of an economic right in the work (thus circumvention alone is deemed an infringement). The bill prohibits picking the digital locks (often referred to as circumventing technological protection measures) that frequently accompany consumer products such as CDs, DVDs, and electronic books. Under the new bill, transferring music from a copy-protected CD to an iPod could violate the law. So too could efforts to play a region-coded DVD from a non-Canadian region.
Even the few exceptions to anti-circumvention measures in the bill are deceptive since the software programs needed to pick the digital lock in order to protect privacy or engage in research are prohibited. This is a part of the bill I hope will be amended when the bill gets to committee so that only deliberate infringement of commercial copyright is punished, not the possession of the technology to do so.
As you can see, this is a highly technical piece of legislation, and I will have to study it more closely. While it is my hope that the Conservatives will send this bill to committee for further study and changes b
Re:No Worries (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, but in the meanwhile, they will have enacted it, and you can bet your arse the liberals won't scrap it afterwards. After all, they haven't scrapped the GST as they promised...
(The GST is a classic case of ideologic stupidity. What the government did was replace a hidden 12% tax with a visible 7% tax, but they so badly explained it that people got to hate it).
Re:No Worries (Score:3, Informative)
I also think that because of this issue and the fact that we now have the internet with which to organize ourselves, we may actually do something about these laws before they become law. As you stated, history has shown that it's far more difficult to remove a law than to fight a bill.
Prentice was pretty freaked out before Christmas when an impromptu protest was set up in this very forum. Over 40 people showed up at his office the very next day for an Open House and proceeded to quiz him on this bill and his intentions. They thought there was no opposition to this. The were wrong then, and they're wrong now.
Re:No Worries (Score:3, Informative)
The problem here is not money it's the previous government signing a treaty that makes something like the DMCA a requirement and the US ambassador lobbying on behalf of the RIAA/MPAA threatening to damage Canada's economy with a trade war.
Just to be clear, parliament doesn't have to pass a DMCA-style bill. Signing the WIPO treaty is like dating, it's not a commitment to marriage. And even if they decide that they really do want to commit to complying with WIPO, most of the crappy parts of Bill C-61 aren't required under the treaty.
Re:No Worries (Score:3, Informative)
The electorate could indeed keep voting for Conservative and the Liberal minority governments. This would have the effect of eventually bankrupting the major political parties (a good thing in my view) and might lead those parties to some pretty severe institutional changes.
The fact is that at the moment there seems equal odds of either party forming a minority government. There are simply no chance of either one getting a majority. What that likely means as far as this legislation is concerned is that if either the Bloc or the NDP decide they don't like it, it probably won't go through.
I have some suspicion, at least, that the whole thing was a stunt. Prentice and Harper know full well that no controversial legislation has a hope in hell of ever getting passed, particularly as all the major parties have increasingly itchy trigger fingers. This probably was nothing more than an attempt to con the US media giants into the belief that the Canadian government takes copyright "reform" seriously, with the full knowledge that the Opposition would, for purely political reasons, suddenly decide that this Canadian DMCA is bad. This is very ironic for the Liberals, as a lot of the groundwork of this bill was done while the Liberals were in power, but because they were reduced to a minority after Chretien was forced from office they didn't have the clout to pull it off. That situation has remained the same ever since.
The fact is that in a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy, a minority government that cannot form some sort of semi-permanent coalition can only remain in power by doing as little as possible. The Conservatives are in a position where they are a minority government with three left-of-center (to one degree or another) parties holding the plurality of votes, I'll be more scared if we get a Liberal minority government, because they'll form a coalition with the NDP, probably bribe over a few more centrist Conservatives and get themselves a functioning majority voting bloc, and will then happily sell us all down the river with some new version of this horrible copyright legislation.