ACTRA, the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists, is the union of more than 22,000 professional performers working in English-language recorded media in Canada including TV, film, radio and digital media. I have disagreed in the past with several its positions on copyright reform, including one member calling mashups morally wrong and a six-part fix that would remove fair dealing reform. ACTRA’s 2009 national copyright consultation submission supported the use of digital locks, but also recognized the need for limits on the legal protections associated with them including the need to ensure that exceptions and limitations are not lost:

The choice of whether or not to use a TPM in connection with controlling access to a copyright protected work or which restricts copyright protected acts rests with rightsholders. Some will choose to use them, others will not. In accordance with the WIPO Treaties, rightsholders should have recourse against persons who deliberately circumvent their TPMs. By the same token, users who have legal access to a work should not be prevented by TPMs from availing themselves of statutory exceptions or limitations. Moreover, legal protection for TPMs should be subject to privacy, interoperability, and encryption research considerations, for example.

Read more ›