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The Daily Digital Lock Dissenter: The Series To Date

Throughout the fall, I ran a daily digital lock dissenter series, pointing to a wide range of organizations representing creators, consumers, businesses, educators, historians, archivists, and librarians who have issued policy statements that are at odds with the government’s approach to digital locks in Bill C-11. While the series took a break over the Parliamentary holiday, it resumes this week with more groups and individuals that have spoken out against restrictive digital lock legislation that fails to strike a fair balance.

New posts will begin tomorrow, but it may be helpful to recount the series to date, which illustrates that no amount of spin can disguise the obvious opposition from groups representing millions of Canadians to the Bill C-11 digital lock provisions:

Type of Group Digital Lock Dissenters
Business Retail Council of Canada
Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright
Canadian Bookseller Association
The Canadian Association for Open Source
Literary Press Group of Canada
Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia
Association of Canadian Publishers
Campus Stores Canada
Digital Security Coalition
Battlegoat Studios
Creators Documentary Organization of Canada
Appropriation Art
Writers Guild of Canada
ACTRA
Canadian Music Creators Coalition
Consumers Canadian Consumer Initiative
Public Interest Advocacy Centre
Union des consommateurs
Educators Canadian Teachers’ Federation
Council of Ministers of Education Canada
Canadian Home and School Federation
Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Canadian Association of Media Education Associations
Film Studies Association of Canada
Association of Canadian Community Colleges
Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada
Canadian Association of University Teachers
Canadian Political Science Association
British Columbia Teachers’ Federation
Queen’s University
Students Canadian Federation of Students
Federation Etudiante Universitaire du Quebec
Canadian Alliance of Student Associations
Historians/Archivists Canadian Council of Archives
Canadian Historical Association
Association of Newfoundland and Labrador Archives
City of Vancouver Archives
Librarians Canadian Library Association
Canadian Association of Research Libraries
Canadian Association of Law Libraries
Canadian Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres
Association pour l’avancement des sciences et des techniques de la documentation (ASTED
New Brunswick Public Library Service
Canadian Urban Library Council
Ontario Council of University Libraries
Visually Impaired Provincial Resource Centre for the Visually Impaired (PRCVI) BC
Canadian National Institute for the Blind
Canadian Association of Educational Resource Centres for Alternate Format Materials
Rights/Freedoms Canadian Civil Liberties Association
Canadian Bar Association
Privacy Commissioner of Canada
CIPPIC

15 Comments

  1. clerks
    clerks…

    if it isn’t in their manual, it doesn’t exist.
    (politics replaces religion replaces faith)

    Karma will run over their dogma, eventually… as their attempts to make their friends rich get overturned.

    the ‘risky-shift’ effect (small group dynamics) leaders will make fools of themselves, not fool the people.

    this nonsense will go on till the pension plans are broken.

    packrat

  2. Who agrees with it.
    It would be nice to see, as a comparison, who actually agrees with the Digital Lock Rules.

  3. Devil's Advocate says:

    Re: Who agrees with it?
    “It would be nice to see, as a comparison, who actually agrees with the Digital Lock Rules.”

    Such a list would certainly be a much shorter read, and would most likely be composed exclusively of the usual “alphabet soup” of acronyms representing the usual “trade groups”.

  4. I fear it probably doesn’t really matter how long the list of organizations that disagree with C11’s digital lock provisions gets… as long as it is on the conservative’s agenda to pass the bill with those provisions intact, it will pass, because the conservatives hold a majority in parliament, and I think that to them, that’s all that ultimately matters. Meanwhile, enough of the people who voted for them are ignorant enough about this whole concept that it probably wouldn’t even significantly affect their chances of reelection.

  5. http://www.ipolitics.ca/2012/01/30/fen-hampson-will-the-medium-stop-killing-the-message/

    I send iPolitics this comment.

    For the article “Will the medium stop killing the message?” he says:

    “Allegations by some that the bill will infringe on the rights of private citizens to transfer something they own from one digital medium to another are vastly overstated.

    As others have pointed out, the bill would actually afford greater legal protection to consumers by allowing “format shifting” and “time shifting.””

    This is not correct. The presence of digital locks (Which ALL BluRay movies and most DVDs are encumbered with, with both encryption and region coding) trump ALL user rights, including format shifting, time shifting, the ability to make back-ups, personal copies of content you purchase, etc. Kindle books are another example of locked content that would become illegal to convert under C-11, even if you legally purchased it. While mostly, but not entirely gone, DRM protected music would become illegal to convert to any other format. The digital lock rules, like those found the the American DMCA, could have unintended consequences in other sectors, such as the auto and mobile device industries. The digital lock rules is the only serious problem most people I know have with C-11.

  6. CBC live chat
    C-11 was one of the first issues brought up in the CBC live chat today.

  7. "Dr. Freedom" says:

    Bill C-11 Will Pass… then What to Do?
    Take action with your wallet. It’s much more effective than writing letters to your favorite politician:

    http://resistcorptyranny.wordpress.com/

  8. All taking action with one’s wallet in the case of protesting C11 after it passes means is voluntarily ostracizing oneself from a highly technological society that is only growing increasingly dependent on digital storage and storage mediums. The only hope that remains, I think, is for the extent of the digital lock provisions to be shown to be either unconstitutional, or otherwise fundamentally incompatible with the concept of copyright… and although definitely not impossible, I don’t think the odds are particularly great on that front either.

  9. @Mark
    “All taking action with one’s wallet in the case of protesting C11 after it passes means is voluntarily ostracizing oneself”

    I’d rather spend my time and money elsewhere, by choice, than pay the bully.

  10. The real question is
    Can we get wikipedia to go black for bill c-11 or do any of the “dissenters” have a web site that has 300 million hits a day?

    otherwise they will all be ignored.

  11. blackout day
    I really hope that Google.ca will be in on a blackout day also.

  12. Blackout day
    The real question is will anyone in Canada even notice or care?

  13. Halina McKenzie says:

    Citizen
    You forgot to add MegaUploads to the list of objectors…

  14. Halina McKenzie
    MegaUploads was a p2p site that made money from large scale copyright infringement, not a site that provided DRM circumvention tools. What was your point, exactly?