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The Daily Digital Lock Dissenter, Day 4: Canadian Council of Archives

The Canadian Council of Archives is Canada’s leading archivist organization, with a mandate “to preserve and provide access to Canadian documentary heritage by improving the administration, effectiveness and efficiency of the archival system.” The CCA’s comments on the C-32 digital lock provisions:

Bill C-32 prohibits the circumvention of TPMs for legal purposes such as preservation activities used by archivists to protect the documentary heritage of Canada.  This is completely unacceptable and is a matter of very grave concern to the Canadian archives community in the digital environment where obsolescence is both rapid and disastrous for long-term access.  The CCA recommends that Bill C-32 be amended to provide that circumvention of TPMs is prohibited only when the circumvention is for the purpose of infringing copyright and that circumvention tools and services should be available for non-infringing uses.

Previous Daily Digital Locks: Provincial Resource Centre for the Visually Impaired (PRCVI) BC, Canadian Consumer Initiative, Retail Council of Canada

10 Comments

  1. Mozart, Picasso? Never heard of them …
    Those pushing for this legislation from the creative community should be the first to want our literary and artistic heritage preserved.

    But the needs of the present, or at least the profits, seem to be more pressing.


  2. Well, if Harper ignores all the public and business groups on this digital locks issue, and gets away with it, then he sets a precedent to be free to ignore anything else he feels like.

    That, I believe, is more scary. Just look at the how deep the hole the corruption of media control in the Italian government’s hands has led them. It’s an extreme example, Canada is nowhere near that level, but a real life one none the less. Too much control is just as bad as not enough.

    Listen to the public on this issue, Harper. Listen or be doomed to repeat the mistakes of others.

  3. The Harper Government already ignores people who don’t agree with what their party is trying to do. The problem now is they can do that without being held accountable by the opposition since he doesn’t need to make them happy anymore to get things passed in Parliament.

  4. Good job, CCA!
    “The CCA recommends that Bill C-32 be amended to provide that circumvention of TPMs is prohibited only when the circumvention is for the purpose of infringing copyright and that circumvention tools and services should be available for non-infringing uses. ”

    Excellent job by the CCA! Instead of just limiting their recommendation to their own small community, they must have realized that average Canadians have the same problem: formats becoming obsolete.

    I have a large collection of Atari 800 and Commodore Amiga software that are on floppy disks and most are protected by copy-protection schemes. Not only can I not currently read the Atari 5.25″ and Amiga 880kb 3.5″ floppies, they are also long past the shelf life for magnetic media and are/will become unreadable and the content forever lost to me. Regarding CDs and DVDs, while the medium itself is still current, for individual (pressed) discs degradation can happen as well. Collectively this phenomenon is known as “bit rot” and the only remedy is regular backups (and even more frequent backups of backups).


  5. I just participated to a democratic process called “elections”.

    Stop reading this and go vote too! Now!

  6. @Napalm: Perhaps you were unaware that C-32 (now C-11) is a federal bill. The last federal election was several months ago. The next one will not be for several years. In the interim, provincial or civic elections will not have any impact on it. The government that is in power controls over 50% of the seats in parliament, and appear to have no compunction about ignoring anyone who disagrees with them on this bill (which is every other party in parliament, actually).

  7. Let’s go further
    Let’s make permission to use digital locks dependent on first filing unprotected copies with several national archives. There may be restrictions on when the archives can release the materials, but they are guaranteed to become public eventually.


  8. @Mark: “Perhaps you were unaware that C-32 (now C-11) is a federal bill. The last federal election was several months ago. The next one will not be for several years. In the interim, provincial or civic elections will not have any impact on it.”

    Perhaps you were unaware that, while it is established that copyright is of federal jurisdiction, it is not clear that TPMs, especially when not connected to copyright issues, are the business of the feds.

    If it proves later that they are of provincial competence, your provincial election vote counts.

  9. Archives
    We don’t need no archives. They might end up on something like Wikileaks and become embarrassing. Better curb this from the beginning.