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Monday October 03, 2011 |
With the introduction of Bill C-11 last week, the government plans to
move swiftly to pass its copyright reform bill, including restrictive
digital lock rules that have been roundly criticized by many consumer,
education, and business groups from across the country. As the bill
winds its way through the legislative process, I thought it would be
useful to provide a daily reminder of what Canadians have told the
government about the digital lock issue. Over the next few months, I
plan a daily digital lock post that quotes from a submission to the
Bill C-32 legislative committee or the 2009 national copyright
consultation. The posts will begin with group submissions but I'll
feature individual submissions later in the series as well.
The series begins with the Provincial
Resource Centre for the Visually Impaired (PRCVI) British Columbia,
which works to assist blind and visually impaired students:
The exception that permits
circumvention of technological protection
measures (TPMs) and the means to circumvent these measures for the
purpose of producing alternate formats (Section 41.16(1)) may be
largely nullified by the condition “to not unduly impair the
technological protection measure.” According to the Canadian Library
Association there is no effective technical way to remove the TPMs and
to restore them after an alternate format has been created. The TPMs
would in all likelihood, interfere with the use of some, if not all, of
the adaptive technologies used by students with perceptual disabilities
to access educational materials.
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Tuesday August 05, 2008 |
In light of yesterday's posting on the perceptual disabilities exception, which I argue creates a huge barrier for Canadians with disabilities since they will be unable to legally access devices that can be used to circumvent, it is worth considering whether Bill C-61 violates the spirit and letter of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (or will at a minimum necessitate a DRM accessibility standard). The AODA was enacted in 2005 with the goal of "developing, implementing and enforcing accessibility standards in order to achieve accessibility for Ontarians with disabilities with respect to goods, services, facilities, accommodation, employment, buildings, structures and premises on or before January 1, 2025." The Act will set out policy, practices, and other requirements that remove barriers with respect to goods and services. It defines barriers as:
"anything that prevents a person with a disability from fully participating in all aspects of society because of his or her disability, including a physical barrier, an architectural barrier, an information or communications barrier, an attitudinal barrier, a technological barrier, a policy or a practice"
That definition would likely capture DRM and it definitely captures the combination of DRM and Bill C-61's anti-circumvention provisions.
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Monday August 04, 2008 |
Bill C-61 has the potential to impede access for all Canadians; however, one group may be particularly hard hit by widespread DRM use and the bill's anti-circumvention provisions. Those with print disabilities (called perceptual disabilities in the Copyright Act) rely on new voice technologies to gain access to works that they are physically unable to view. DRM can be used to limit or eliminate the use of technologies to read text aloud, thereby rendering it inaccessible for a segment of the population. Indeed, for those that think this is a mere fairy tale, one of the better known instances of "read aloud" restrictions involved the Adobe eReader, which restricted the reading aloud function for Alice in Wonderland.
The Copyright Act contains a specific provision to address access for the print disabled. Section 32(1) provides that:
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