SOPA-style Amendments Dropped From C-11; DRM Provisions Not 50
New submitter Ashenkase writes "Michal Geist reviews what stayed and what was rejected by the Bill C-11 Committee Review. Looks like SOPA-style amendments are dropped except Digital Locks. There is still a chance for Canadians to have their voices heard before third reading: 'The Bill C-11 legislative committee concluded its clause-by-clause review yesterday as eight government amendments were added to the bill and all opposition amendments were defeated. The amendments included an expanded enabler provision and some modest tinkering to other elements of the bill. There are still several steps needed before the bill passes including third reading at the House of Commons, Senate review, and ultimately royal assent, but Canadian copyright reform is well on its way to completion before the summer starts. In the days leading up to the clause-by-clause review, many focused on three key issues: no SOPA-style amendments such as website blocking or warrantless disclosure of information, maintaining the fair dealing balance found in the bill, and amending the digital lock provisions. By that standard, the changes could have been a lot worse. The government expanded the enabler provision, though not as broadly as CIMA requested. Virtually all other copyright lobby demands — website blocking, notice-and-takedown, iPod tax, copyright term extension, disclosure of subscriber information — were rejected. Moreover, the provisions supported by consumer and education groups including user generated content protection, time shifting, format shifting, backup copies, Internet provider liability, and statutory damages reform were left untouched. This represents a major victory for the many Canadians and groups such as Open Media that spoke out on these issues.'"
No victory at all for Canadians (Score:3, Insightful)
Our Dear Leader will just try again in a few months. He won't stop until his corporate buddies get everything they want.
Don't be a moron (Score:4, Insightful)
Whatever you may think of him, we're four years away from a federal election and Harper's Conservatives control parliament the C-11 committee. If Stephen Harper want to give his "corporate buddies" "everything they want," he wouldn't need to "try again in a few months." The amendments would have been approved, and the bill would pass the house of commons. In fact, C-11 is a reintroduction of a bill that died on the order paper last parliament, so they wouldn't have even needed to put them in as amendments: "everything they want" would have been introduced with the rest of the bill at second reading. Either way, any public outcry would be drowned out in a few weeks by the forthcoming budget debate.
Don't be a moron. It's not an endearing quality.
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I invite you to read the HOWTO on boiling frogs. It has so many applications.
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Only a moron would think that this is the end of it and that Little Hitler/Harper won't try this and worse again. Both he and the conservatives know it is a balancing act; selling out Canadian's freedoms and getting reelected.
You can eat your words when they table again all the items they couldn't bamboozle through this time. They will try again and again until they can slide it through without a fuss. Next time they will probably package it with other items like "all newborn Canadians must be tattooed with
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There should be a "-1 senseless partisan rhetoric" moderation option. After just a few years of minorty-party rule political discourse in Canada has descended to playground fistfights and bickering--quite sad really.
How soon people forget what it is like to have a majority government in parliament. "PM Harper is a tyrant who will stop at nothing to impose his hidden agenda/corporate lobby buddies wishes/kitten-killing campaign/etc" blah blah blah. Same could've been said about Cretien, or Mulroney, or Tr
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Why try again? they got everything they actually wanted, AND made people think that they didn't. It's win-win for everyone... well, except the general population, but we don't count anymore.
This is classic, they ask for a thousand things, and settle for 500, meanwhile the media reports how the grassroots campaigns won and that consumers "only" lost half their rights. That's not a victory for us!
DRM is still bad though (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't be happy until this crap is completely dead.
Re:"a chance for Canadians to have their say" (Score:4, Informative)
I voiced my complaint to my local representative and got back a form letter that said basically everyone who read the legislation is wrong and C-11 is nothing but puppy dogs and unicorns.
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Same here. And it had a brutally condescending tone to it to boot.
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I didn't get a reply at all... though my MP was already against it so I'm guessing even if they did read it and agree it wouldn't have done much good.
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He seemed so shocked when I stepped sideways to avoid him when he was glad-handing at the local GO-train station during the last election.
Hahaha nice B-)
Re:"a chance for Canadians to have their say" (Score:5, Informative)
For the most part, C-11 is puppy dogs and unicorns. Remember that Star Wars reedit which made slashdot a few days ago? It wasn't released, copyright concerns and all... C-11 is supposed to update copyright law to reflect changes in technology. One of those technology changes is low cost and widely available production/editing software and equipment, and so one C-11's updates is to make use of copyrighted content in private noncommercial projects (like that Star Wars reedit) explicitly legal.
I've read the entire bill, and as far as I can tell the only bad thing about it is the digital locks provision, which is just a small part. If your complaint was about how awful C-11 was and SOPA this and SOPA that, like almost all of the criticisms I've seen, then they were right. C-11 is not and has never been anything close to resembling SOPA, and with the conclusion of the legislative committee, it will continue to be nothing like SOPA.
The digital locks provision certainly is distasteful, but it's hard to take criticisms of a bill seriously which fail to demonstrate more than a passing acquaintance with its actual contents.
Re:"a chance for Canadians to have their say" (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because the actual contents don't matter - they're completely bypassed by the "small part" of the bill.
I don't care to read the rest of the bill, because it doesn't matter. If all one needs to do is slap a digital lock on a work to completely bypass fair use, then why should I read the rest of the bill?
The digital lock provision isn't a "small part" of the bill.
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Exactly. The legislation is inconsistent at it's core. It confirms Canadians right to format shift, time shift, and back up their media, then contradicts that with a clause that provides DMCA-style protections for DRM locking technologies.
It's just a matter of time until this inconsistency hits the courts and the DMCA provisions are struck down by a judge with a functioning brain cell (something sorely lacking in the Conservative's disputed "majority.") I have no doubt people other than me raised the
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The digital locks provision isn't just distasteful. It allows copyright holders to trump pretty much all other rights, so long as there's some kind of a digital lock in place. Think about the logical conclusion of that: By slapping a ROT13 cipher on anything you produce, you can trump academic use rights, personal use rights, reporting use rights, and more. The loophole is so big, you could fly a 747 through it.
Re:"a chance for Canadians to have their say" (Score:4, Insightful)
"I've read the entire bill, and as far as I can tell the only bad thing about it is the digital locks provision, which is just a small part."
It may be a small part in writing, but it affects almost everything in there. It means that the copyright holders can trump any of the more enlightened provisions in the new law by installing DRM on their content. Want to format-shift your DVDs as the new bill claims you can do legally? No go. Not unless it's a DVD without CSS, which are extraordinarily rare, and most DVDs have additional DRM. Same for all sorts of things. Don't want to fish the CD off the shelf every time you want to play a game? Usually I'd install a NoCD patch for my legitimately purchased games. Not legal anymore.
The "digital locks" provisions negate most of the good points about the rest of the bill, and that's despite year after year of people pointing out the problem through multiple revisions of this bill. The facts are pretty clear that the current government doesn't care about the problem and wants to ram it through parliament anyway. They think Canadians are stupid, because when the government advertises "the new bill now lets Canadians legally do things they've always done anyway (e.g., format shifting)", the bill actually does the opposite, and makes many things technically illegal in the majority of circumstances whereas previously you could have defended yourself on the grounds of "fair dealing" and ignored the DMCA-like provisions (because they didn't exist yet). Wherever DRM is implemented, it rolls back the "fair dealing" rights we finally gained when the supreme court ruled on the matter back in 2004.
I don't like it, but apparently when this passes I'm going to have to break the law to get rid of the DRM on content I've legitimately purchased and want to use on whatever devices I wish. People who care about following the law are worse off.
Puppy-killing Unicorn (Score:5, Insightful)
But that's the evil brilliance of bill. That one little digital lock provision undermines everything else in the bill like a puppy-killing unicorn. Removing a "digital lock" (AKA DRM) is illegal EVEN IF you are doing it to create something that is otherwise legal under the other parts of the bill like time-shifting, format-shifting and yes even the noncommercial Star Wars re-edit (it's pretty hard to re-edit something without source material, and the Star Wars prequels have never been released in a non-DRM format).
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If you do something, like re-edit a Star Wars release privately and noncommercially, and speak publicly against it, they then have cause to investigate you for breaking the DRM. You publicly spoke of doing something that is not possible to do without having broken a law -- even if the act you were directly speaking of is not itself illegal.
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Over here in the land of NASCAR and rodeos, I did the same to my two Senators and one Representative around the time of the whole SOPA/PIPA thing. I received a form letter of "this is needed to protect the industry" from one and a much, much more personalized written letter acknowledging the flaws of SOPA/PIPA and how he has never supported them (which is true on his part). The third person has yet to respond.
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I called instead. It's takes about as much of your time and I would think is worth much more than an email in terms of 'voter value'.
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I sincerely hope Mr.-wrong-name got the condescending jerkass letter meant for me.
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Or maybe they put you on the "toss before the MP gets to read it" list.
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Now this is odd... why does something factual and completely on-topic get modded overrated?
Likely because it actually says the opposite of what people like to believe -- that politicians don't actually pay attention to people.
Either that, or it was due to the fact that the parent "nobody is listening" that I'm rebutting was downmodded for trolling in the first place.
Now THIS message should rightfully be downmodded.
finally (Score:2)
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Response from Gary Goodyear, P.C., M.P. (Score:4, Informative)
Dear Anonymous Coward,
Thank you for your recent correspondence regarding the Lawful Access tools in our proposed legislation. I am always happy to respond to the questions and concerns of my constituents.
Our Government is strongly committed to ensuring that Canadians’ rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms are respected.
The new lawful access tools proposed in our legislation will not derogate from existing safeguards and privacy protections. The need to respect a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy, as protected under the Charter, always guides law reform. Such authority will continue to be exercised bearing in mind privacy rights under other legislation, such as the Privacy Act and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.
Police will still be required to obtain judicial authorizations in order to obtain information under our legislation and law enforcement agencies will not be able to intercept private communications or obtain transmission data without being authorized to do so by law. Let me be very clear: the police will not be able to read emails or view web activity unless they obtain a warrant issued by a judge.
While technology has advanced significantly over the past four decades, the legal frameworks and investigative tools available to the police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) have not kept pace with this evolution. This proposed legislation would provide law enforcement and CSIS with the modern investigative tools they need to help fight crime and thwart national security threats.
The investigative tools created in this legislation preserve existing safeguards, such as requirements for warrants, court authorizations or other lawful authority to target specified communications. They are time-limited, and nothing put forward in the proposed legislation would reduce the existing safeguards.
Thank you again for taking the time to write regarding this issue. If you have any further questions or concerns please do not hesitate to contact my office.
Yours sincerely,
Hon. Gary Goodyear, P.C., M.P.
Cambridge-North Dumfries
Re:Response from Gary Goodyear, P.C., M.P. (Score:4, Insightful)
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The point of writing your MP is to let them know that you oppose/support what they are doing. If they get flooded with letters they might reconsider their stance on the issue. The repsonse you get is irrelevent.
SOPA was never in to begin with. (Score:4, Informative)
DRM / "digital locks" stupidity (Score:1)
It's still stupid that even though I can do X because of "fair dealing", it's illegal to do X if I have to break "digital locks" in order to do it. This is the same lunacy that made the DMCA in the US so ridiculous. When is it going to sink in that none of the format-shifting or other provisions that are legal in the proposed bill make any sense unless you can legally *exercise* those rights regardless of what protections the copyright holder places on the material? It's like saying "Yes, you can legally