Several people have written over the past week to repeat a question that arose regularly last December – "what do you think fair copyright reform looks like?" My 61 reforms to C-61 will address many needed changes to the Prentice bill, but it is simpler to point to the eight key principles that I outlined earlier this year. While I think the principles reflect a balanced approach that is consistent with the underlying values of copyright, only one is fully reflected in Bill C-61. The eight principles with commentary on the impact of C-61:
Post Tagged with: "anti-circumvention"
Taking Stock of My Fair Copyright for Canada Principles
New Zealand’s Digital Copyright Law Demonstrates Anti-Circumvention Flexibility
New Zealand passed its digital copyright law this week, drawing the ire of the technology community and the blogosphere. While the bill isn't great, many of the provisions are far better than what Industry Minister Jim Prentice may have in mind for Canada including format and time shifting provisions as well as anti-circumvention provisions that are more flexible than those found in the DMCA. In fact, the anti-circumvention provisions are arguably the best of any country, since they are compliant with WIPO, limited in scope, and seek to preserve fair dealing rights.
On the anti-circumvention front, there are several things to note:
- the technological protection measures (TPMs) expressly exclude access controls such as region coding. In other words, the anti-circumvention provisions do not apply to devices that "only controls access to a work for non-infringing purposes."
- the legislation targets anti-circumvention devices, but excludes those devices that have something more than "limited commercially significant applications" other than circumventing a TPM.
- the law prohibits making, selling, distributing, advertising, or offering a circumvention device if the person "knows or has reason to believe that it will, or is likely to, be used to infringe copyright." The inclusion of a knowledge requirement creates an additional safeguard against overbroad application of the provision.
- most importantly, the law clearly permits circumvention for "permitted acts", which effectively preserves fair dealing rights (the statute also specifies the right to circumvent for encryption research). More impressive, the law includes a system to facilitate circumvention for permitted acts in the event that users are unable to circumvent a TPM themselves. In such cases, the law allows a "qualified person", which includes librarians, archivists, and educational institutions, to circumvent a TPM on behalf of a user (the user can also ask the copyright owner to unlock the work for them).
Finland Court on Effective Copyright Protection
Lots of interest in a new decision from the Helsinki District Court, which has ruled the copy-protection system for DVDs, known as CSS, is not an effective TPM and therefore circumventing it does not constitute infringement.
Will The Next Copyright Bill Pass Constitutional Scrutiny?
My colleague Jeremy deBeer has been the leading voice questioning whether anti-circumvention legislation – the legal protection for DRM that is often described as "para-copyright" – is constitutional, given that the potential rules arguably involve property rights (which falls under provincial jurisdiction) far more than traditional copyright (a federal matter). […]