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1. Bill C-32 Analysis
Published Page by pnijjar
[ http://kwlug.org/node/746 ]

Here is a page where we can analyze Bill C-32 and come up with
responses
to it for our MPs.
Please help improve it by editing it. 
Resources

http://www2.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?DocId=4580265
[1] : The full text of the bill.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5088/125/ [2] : Annotated
version 
http://www.scribd.com/doc/32485771/C-61-C-32-Comparison-No-Annotation-English
[3] : Comparision between C-61 (the old bill) and C-32
http://webinfo.parl.gc.ca/MembersOfParliament/MainMPsCompleteList.aspx?TimePeriod=Current&Language=E
[4] : Find your member of parliament.

Why Digital Locks are Bad
Here are some thoughts originally floated by John van Ostrand: 
Let me float these ideas around. Do they make sense?
Digital lock anti-circumvention laws are bad because:

They allow corporate interest to supersede the rights of licensees
granted in the Copyright Act and patent law,

 They allow content holders to extent copyright life, or apply
restrictions to public domain content, 
 A digital lock is forever, A company can extract royalties for the
rights to access protected content for ever.


 They provide a way for business to more easily obtain a monopoly on a
technology,

Business will abuse the law in many ways to prevent competition or
circumvent other laws or rights,


They encourage the use if inferior encryption technology,

Why use a suitable technology when the law can be applied to simple and
easy to break locking schemes,
Why is a "don't copy this!" statement not enough of a "digital lock" to
fall under this law? (pnijjar)


They prevent free development of software,

 Linux, used by all sizes of business, will be less powerful and less
able
to compete,
Open source software can be ported to platforms that don't have the
market share for official support (e.g. Minix 3, FreeBSD). Proprietary
solutions are supported at the whim of the vendor. (pnijjar)


They are bad for local economies,

If forced to migrate from Linux and open source software, money for
licenses and support will be sent to foreign companies, instead of
local
companies,
 Local software developers whose products access protected content will
have to pay royalties forever (beyond patent and copyright laws) to
technology owners,


 They can hold my own content hostage,

 Digital locks on proprietary binary formats may be enforce on content
like
word processing documents, databases, or other data files making my own
content
a hostage of the software vendor.
Can I break a digital lock to try to recover my data from a corrupt
file?



Outstanding Questions
These questions need answers. Please answer them with your research. 

Is the blank CD/DVD levy still in effect? How much is it? Was there
really a court case that said that the levy made p2p file sharing
legal?
What court case was it? Is that court case still in effect?
Under this legislation are all open source implementations of DVD
players necessarily illegal?
Can I break a lock on a digitally-locked file that contains content I
generated?

Contributors
The following people contributed to this document: Ralph Janke, John
van Ostrand, Colin Mackay

[1]
http://www2.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?DocId=4580265
[2] http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5088/125/
[3]
http://www.scribd.com/doc/32485771/C-61-C-32-Comparison-No-Annotation-English
[4]
http://webinfo.parl.gc.ca/MembersOfParliament/MainMPsCompleteList.aspx?TimePeriod=Current&Language=E


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