Bill C-11 Canadian Copyright Information - Important stuff to know
This was sent to me in an email from Val (vace117 on lj) and he gave me permission to post it up here so I can link to it and spread the information as widely as possible. I have a very high opinion of him both professionally and academically, as well as him being and a much-loved awesome person I do not see enough. What he has written is well researched and clearly articulated, and I really appreciate the time he has taken to write it.
This is pertaining to Bill C-11 which was recently passed into law in Canada. I recommend anyone who is Canadian read it, as well as anyone elsewhere in the world who cares about these things:
***
As you might have heard, bill C-11 was passed into law last Friday. Since we all like to consume and manipulate our media in fairly geeky ways, I was very concerned about the repercussions of this bill on our daily activities, as well as its effects on Canadian copyright in general. The following is a synthesis of a few information sources into a summary of what I feel are the salient aspects of the bill for us as consumers. I thought that you might find this information interesting.
GOOD:
1) Expansion of Fair Dealing to include exceptions for parody, satire and education
2) Exceptions for remixed, user generated content for non-commercial purposes.
3) Reasonable backup, time shifting and format shifting provisions
4) Alternate format reproduction
5) Notice-and-notice instead of the notice-and-takedown liability model for ISPs
BAD:
- DRM-style Technological Protection Measures (TPMs), aka "digital locks". If the content is secured with a digital lock, the lock
supersedes all other rights. In other words, the presence of a digital lock trumps all the improved provisions under fair dealing, thus
rendering them void. This means that even though C-11 takes many good steps towards balancing the rights of consumers and IP right holders with the provisions described above, it has a built in loophole for IP right holders to side step all these rights granted to consumers under the bill.
[Michael Geist]:
"In other words, in the battle between two sets of property rights - those of the intellectual property rights holder and those of the
consumer who has purchased the tangible or intangible property - the IP rights holder always wins. This represents market intervention for a particular business model by a government supposedly committed to the free market and it means that the existing fair dealing rights (including research, private study, news reporting, criticism, and review) and the proposed new rights (parody, satire, education, time shifting, format shifting, backup copies) all cease to function effectively so long as the rights holder places a digital lock on their content or device."
So, even though the bill looks like an improvement on the current state of copyright law, it is actually a step back for a lot of different content types, except perhaps Youtube, which seems to really benefit from the new provisions in fair dealing. If I'm understanding this correctly, it is now perfectly legal to rip audio from Youtube and encode it into any format you like.
Practically for us as consumers, I think this means that companies can start putting locks on any media they sell (TV broadcasts, DVDs, e-books, online streams) and physical devices like iPods, phones, gaming consoles, etc. If consumers decide to play the media in a different way, or to back it up, or to decode it with anything other than the provided software, or if they decide to mod their hardware in some ways, it opens them up to legal action.
For example, if a content provider decides that I should not be able to use a PVR to record a program for later watching, they can do that even though the action itself is clearly legal under fair dealing part of the bill. However, in order to record the broadcast, I am forced to bypass a digital lock, which is illegal and supersedes my right to time shift the content. If I modify an iPod which I purchased from Apple, Apple can sue me if they so choose, despite the fact that common sense would suggest that I am free to do whatever I want to my own property.
The problem here is that the circumvention of TPMs is illegal, even if the use of the obtained content is not.
That said though, experts note that the bill appears to be written in a way that provides an easy way to introduce additional exceptions, which makes this flawed bill into something that can be fixed with relative ease. I can only hope that this was intentional. In general, I must say that there is a lot of fear mongering about C-11 on the Internet right now, and some of it is not really true. For example, some sources liken C-11 to SOPA, which is an unfair comparison. C-11 contains a lot of progressive legislation in it, but is still held back by the TPM provisions.
As it stands right now, the bill still appears to be more targeted towards protecting legacy business models, rather than satisfying WIPO treaty requirements, which is the number one justification provided by the proponents of the bill.
For more info about how this bill effects education, research and innovation, please refer to the links below:
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6544/125/
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5080/125/
http://www.globaltvedmonton.com/q++a+how+will+the+countrys+copyright+laws+affect+canadians/6442576667/story.html
http://wordsbynowak.com/2011/10/03/copyright-c11/
This is pertaining to Bill C-11 which was recently passed into law in Canada. I recommend anyone who is Canadian read it, as well as anyone elsewhere in the world who cares about these things:
***
As you might have heard, bill C-11 was passed into law last Friday. Since we all like to consume and manipulate our media in fairly geeky ways, I was very concerned about the repercussions of this bill on our daily activities, as well as its effects on Canadian copyright in general. The following is a synthesis of a few information sources into a summary of what I feel are the salient aspects of the bill for us as consumers. I thought that you might find this information interesting.
GOOD:
1) Expansion of Fair Dealing to include exceptions for parody, satire and education
2) Exceptions for remixed, user generated content for non-commercial purposes.
3) Reasonable backup, time shifting and format shifting provisions
4) Alternate format reproduction
5) Notice-and-notice instead of the notice-and-takedown liability model for ISPs
BAD:
- DRM-style Technological Protection Measures (TPMs), aka "digital locks". If the content is secured with a digital lock, the lock
supersedes all other rights. In other words, the presence of a digital lock trumps all the improved provisions under fair dealing, thus
rendering them void. This means that even though C-11 takes many good steps towards balancing the rights of consumers and IP right holders with the provisions described above, it has a built in loophole for IP right holders to side step all these rights granted to consumers under the bill.
[Michael Geist]:
"In other words, in the battle between two sets of property rights - those of the intellectual property rights holder and those of the
consumer who has purchased the tangible or intangible property - the IP rights holder always wins. This represents market intervention for a particular business model by a government supposedly committed to the free market and it means that the existing fair dealing rights (including research, private study, news reporting, criticism, and review) and the proposed new rights (parody, satire, education, time shifting, format shifting, backup copies) all cease to function effectively so long as the rights holder places a digital lock on their content or device."
So, even though the bill looks like an improvement on the current state of copyright law, it is actually a step back for a lot of different content types, except perhaps Youtube, which seems to really benefit from the new provisions in fair dealing. If I'm understanding this correctly, it is now perfectly legal to rip audio from Youtube and encode it into any format you like.
Practically for us as consumers, I think this means that companies can start putting locks on any media they sell (TV broadcasts, DVDs, e-books, online streams) and physical devices like iPods, phones, gaming consoles, etc. If consumers decide to play the media in a different way, or to back it up, or to decode it with anything other than the provided software, or if they decide to mod their hardware in some ways, it opens them up to legal action.
For example, if a content provider decides that I should not be able to use a PVR to record a program for later watching, they can do that even though the action itself is clearly legal under fair dealing part of the bill. However, in order to record the broadcast, I am forced to bypass a digital lock, which is illegal and supersedes my right to time shift the content. If I modify an iPod which I purchased from Apple, Apple can sue me if they so choose, despite the fact that common sense would suggest that I am free to do whatever I want to my own property.
The problem here is that the circumvention of TPMs is illegal, even if the use of the obtained content is not.
That said though, experts note that the bill appears to be written in a way that provides an easy way to introduce additional exceptions, which makes this flawed bill into something that can be fixed with relative ease. I can only hope that this was intentional. In general, I must say that there is a lot of fear mongering about C-11 on the Internet right now, and some of it is not really true. For example, some sources liken C-11 to SOPA, which is an unfair comparison. C-11 contains a lot of progressive legislation in it, but is still held back by the TPM provisions.
As it stands right now, the bill still appears to be more targeted towards protecting legacy business models, rather than satisfying WIPO treaty requirements, which is the number one justification provided by the proponents of the bill.
For more info about how this bill effects education, research and innovation, please refer to the links below:
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6544/125/
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5080/125/
http://www.globaltvedmonton.com/q++a+how+will+the+countrys+copyright+laws+affect+canadians/6442576667/story.html
http://wordsbynowak.com/2011/10/03/copyright-c11/