News

Liberals Preparing C-32 Amendments on Digital Locks & Fair Dealing

The Wire Report reports that the Liberals are preparing amendments to Bill C-32 to address digital locks and fair dealing.  The digital lock reforms will apparently address the consumer rights concerns, as Garneau notes in the article that “we believe that if somebody has legitimately bought a work and wants to transfer it to another device for personal use only, that should be allowed.” In order to ensure that consumers have those rights, it would be necessary to both remove the digital lock restrictions in the consumer provisions and amend the general anti-circumvention provision (to do one without the other would still leave consumers locked out).

Garneau also said that the Liberals are considering a reform proposal to the fair dealing provision, by adding a list of factors to help courts determine whether the uses are “fair.”  Garneau noted that the Supreme Court of Canada has established these factors which could be used to help clarify the limits of fair dealing.  As I wrote earlier this month, this kind of codification is precisely the sort of compromise that could provide groups concerned with the fair dealing changes the necessary assurances on its limits.

12 Comments

  1. fair?
    On a land-grab of historic size? monentizing property rights?

    It would be too much to assume fair and reasonable usage of private property, wouldn’t it?

    Or free commentary on news…

    privately.

    pat donovan

  2. The speed of technology
    At the rate technology changes I’m surprised they’re even discussing technological details! I mean, doesn’t iTunes sell mostly un-locked MP3 music these days? Look what happened when Microsoft closed down their music store and told all their customers it was the last chance to update their DRM’d music – do you think anyone is going to fall for that again?! Does the gov’t really think they can force us to do something stupid!?

    DRM is a pain for consumers, but it costs money to the producers as well. How long before video, games, etc. producers realise the cost of DRM isn’t worth it?

    And then C-32 and all the time we wasted on it will just be a bad joke!!!


  3. “DRM is a pain for consumers, but it costs money to the producers as well. How long before video, games, etc. producers realise the cost of DRM isn’t worth it?”

    And economically it doesn’t make sense. It makes copies of content more expensive, lowering customer demand, and reduces the quality of the product, further reducing customer demand. The marginal cost of adding DRM is much higher than the marginal cost of shared copies. Unfortunately, the stakeholders for this bill don’t seem to understand basic economics.

  4. @Eric L.
    “The marginal cost of adding DRM is much higher than the marginal cost of shared copies. Unfortunately, the stakeholders for this bill don’t seem to understand basic economics.”
    That’s because those are not stakeholders but steak holders… aka: they see “Oh I can make money, i don’t care about spent ressources” a bit like what’s appening in Alberta with that crappy sand based oil extraction that costs more in ressources than the value of said oil.

    Both makes no sense… but unfortunatly our blind steak holders and their political puppets can’t really see it.

  5. Enable them and this is what you’ll get
    In a near future “public intoxication” could be replaced with “format shifting”. Avoid carrying iPods in public places.

    http://www.globalnational.com/Video+released+Ottawa+woman+jailhouse+abuse/3884631/story.html

    Nap.


  6. schultzter said:
    “At the rate technology changes I’m surprised they’re even discussing technological details! I mean, doesn’t iTunes sell mostly un-locked MP3 music these days?”

    Can someone confirm this 100%. Last itme I looked, less than a year ago, their FAQ (Or something I found on their web site, still said they use a propietary format. It concerns me. Napster also claims they’re DRM free…but that only applies to the US, most of the stuff available in canada is still WMA DRM garbage. I primarily use eMusic or Puretracks. eMusic is 100% DRM free and Puretracks is mostly DRM free and is working towards replacing what DRM material they have left. eMusic is nice because the recording quality is somewhat better than most other places. They use high quality VBR (Variable bitrate) encoding usually in the 256kbit range, but it’s been as low as 180kbit and as high as 289kbit in the stuff I bought. Even 180kbit is still generally higher quality than most other services offer.


  7. @IanME: “Can someone confirm this 100%.”

    The old 128kbps DRMed stuff is still there. But most new releases come in 256kbps non-DRM AAC format, and they’ve replaced large parts of the old DRM library with this new format.

    OTOH you’ll have to install iTunes (meh) and it will add your name, account # and some other personal information inside the downloaded files.

    I’m looking forward to the moment that Tony loses his iPod and the finder uploads all the signed files to Bittorent. ROFL.

    Nap.

  8. @Eric L
    “And economically it doesn’t make sense. It makes copies of content more expensive, lowering customer demand, and reduces the quality of the product, further reducing customer demand. The marginal cost of adding DRM is much higher than the marginal cost of shared copies. Unfortunately, the stakeholders for this bill don’t seem to understand basic economics.”

    While I understand what you are saying, and to a point agree, lets look at the bigger picture (with respect to the corporate revenues in the short term). In the short term the majority of the consumers will still buy the product… it is for many the only way that they know how to get it (for instance, they don’t have a computer, or don’t have access to high speed internet) or don’t have the necessary tools to break the TPMs (or even know that it exists). They will continue to buy a second copy to replace a damaged or lost one, or to format shift albums that they have to CD. This means that the company’s revenue stream is more or less the same for the next year. By the time that these policies start to affect the bottom line of the company (the long term), a new CEO and BoD have taken over and it is somebody else’s problem.

    Publicly traded companies have a really hard time with planning for the long haul… shareholder pressures pretty much guarantee that short term planning dominates. That is how many companies that faced an underfunded defined benefit pension plan ended up that way; in some cases I know of they purchased overpriced tech stocks that were still going up. Since these funds are only allowed to be overfunded by a particular amount, and in particular if the employees contributed, the company took a contribution holiday and called that money extra profits, driving up the share price and making the shareholders really happy. Of course, when the overvalued stocks crashed, they owed bug bucks, and since they hadn’t squirrelled away what they would have contributed the profits took a nose dive. However, this happened on someone else’s watch usually. I used to work for a company that this occurred at, and know of another that it occurred at as well. I use this as an example of how publicly traded companies will sacrifice the long term for the sake of the short term.

  9. @Nap
    Ahhh, OK. I would still convert it to MP3, if for no other reason, to remove the digital signing. 😀

  10. Kudos …
    I have to give the Liberals their due for standing up against unfair legislation. With their track record on caving to the conservatives, it is nice to see. I can also see cracks in the conservatives position starting to appear, even if Moore seems to be a ‘little’ confused as what they are.

  11. I think Moore is pretty much going to have to back down on his digital lock section if he doesn’t on the levy section since the arguments against both are the exact same thing, and choosing to support one and not the other shows hypocrisy.

  12. @Crockett
    Well, I agree, sort of. Unfortunately “we intend to introduce amendments soon” doesn’t say much. No more committal than a New Years Resolution. Frankly, as the saying goes, actions speak louder than words. I am waiting to see what they actually come up with before making any decision one way or the other.

    Unfortunately, the way the initial bit of The Wire Report’s article is worded, makes it sound like a trial balloon rather than a party policy statement. Mind you, if they had really cared about this, they wouldn’t have done this so late in the game… comes across as a “me too”.