Today's post kicks off the heart of the 30 Days of DRM series – circumvention rights. Circumvention rights are necessary since everyone agrees that an absolute anti-circumvention provision (ie. circumvention prohibited in all circumstances) is unworkable. There are instances where such a prohibition would result in significant costs by precluding beneficial activities, creating "unintended consequences", and lead to significant harm to the public. Indeed, the DMCA itself includes several narrow exceptions to the general anti-circumvention rule.
The approach in Bill C-60 was to limit (the government believed eliminate) the need for circumvention rights by creating a direct link between circumvention and copyright. Bill C-60 only made it an offence to circumvent a technological measure for the purposes of copyright infringement. In other words, if you had another purpose – for example, protecting your personal privacy – the anti-circumvention provision would not be triggered.
If the new copyright bill adopts a U.S. style approach, then a crucial part of the discussion will be whether the government has identified all the necessary rights to limit the harms associated with anti-circumvention legislation. While these rights might be characterized by some as exceptions, I think they are more appropriately viewed as circumvention rights, analogous to the Supreme Court of Canada's emphasis on user rights.
Privacy protection is an obvious example of a circumvention right.
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