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). […]
Post Tagged with: "anti-circumvention"
Australia A.G. Releases Draft TPM Legislation
While Canada is still weeks or months from new legislation (hence the 30 Days of DRM project), Australia's Attorney General has just released draft anti-circumvention legislation. Australia faces different circumstances from Canada since its free trade agreement with the U.S. requires new laws by the end of the year. The […]
Major Record Labels Adopt ACS
The online community is buzzing today over the announcement that Universal Music plans to "give away" music online through a new service called SpiralFrog (which is also negotiating with other major labels including EMI). The approach is not particularly innovative – the service will be ad-supported, something people like Terry McBride from Nettwerk has been advocating for months and other sectors (television, radio, online gaming, newspapers) have been offering for some time. Moreover, the service is likely to face some challenges – by relying on DRM that is not compatible with the iPod, it is leaving out a large part of the market.
That said, there are at least two bigger points worth making.
The Swiss Take on DRM
Canada is not alone in dealing with DRM. Urs Gasser has an interesting post on a current Swiss anti-circumvention legislative proposal which covers some of the same issues I'm tackling with 30 Days of DRM.
30 Days of DRM – Day One: Linking Copyright and Anti-Circumvention (Markets)
I need to begin day one with a couple of introductory issues for those new to copyright reform. When I speak of a Canadian DMCA, I am focused chiefly on anti-circumvention legislation. The forthcoming bill will likely contain many other provisions (few of which will address the needs of users and many creators) but it is the anti-circumvention provisions that will likely prove to be the most contentious.
So what are anti-circumvention provisions? They are provisions that grant legal protection to technological protection measures (TPMs). In plainer English, traditional copyright law grants creators a basket of exclusive rights in their work. TPMs or digital locks (such as anti-copying technologies on CDs) effectively provide a second layer of protection by making it difficult for most people to copy works in digital format. Anti-circumvention legislation creates a third layer of protection by making it an infringement to simply pick or break the digital lock (in fact, it even goes further by making it an infringement to make available tools or devices that can be used to pick the digital lock). Under the DMCA, it is an infringement to circumvent a TPM even if the intended use of the underlying work would not constitute traditional copyright infringement.
This broad legal protection for TPMs has raised numerous issues over the past eight years.
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