Hill Times Letter: Sookman clouds issues
Letter to the Hill Times Editor published October 20, 2006
Re: “Copyright reform: let the sun shine in,” (The Hill Times, Oct. 23)
Mr. Sookman’s opinion piece starts by talking about things most Canadians agree are good, such as protecting the rights and economic interests of artists. He then describes specific policies which the reader is intended to presume might protect those rights.
As a Canadian software author and activist working to protect the rights of all authors, as well as all users of information technology, I disagree with most of Mr. Sookman’s claims.
The copyright revision debate mirrors a classic “innovators dilemma,” where there are incumbent industries vs. innovators. The incumbents, their associations, and the lawyers who often work for them, are proposing rules which will protect current market positions against competition.
Mr. Sookman quotes from highly controversial Business Software Alliance studies. These studies don’t adequately differentiate between people who are illegally infringing the copyright of BSA members, from people who have chosen legal alternatives to BSA member software. As a person who only produces, uses and commercially supports Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS), the BSA studies have never adequately differentiated me or my customers from copyright infringers.
The highly controversial 1996 WIPO treaties include legal protection for specific abuses of technical protection measures. Copyright holders would be protected in their desire to encode their content in ways such that they are only interoperable with an “authorized” subset of access devices. This circumvents the intent of competition law which is necessary to protect the broader free market economy from the harm of monopolies. It is also a massive expansion of copyright law into areas that have nothing to do with copyright.
This is coupled with technical measures applied by device manufacturers to communications tools which treat their owners as “attackers” of these devices. Most of the attacks to the rights of Canadians (including authors) that Michael Geist speaks about are derivatives of this attack on basic tangible property rights.
Mr. Sookman and his clients are proposing a marketplace that excludes FLOSS, where FLOSS represents the greatest competitive threat to BSA members. FLOSS protects the rights of owners of computers to “run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve software.” It is obvious that content will be encoded such that it is not interoperable with this transparent and accountable type of software.
The abuse of these technologies to protect copyright is based on science fiction, and not science. Cryptographic theory, the strongest of the technical measures, describes why you can’t use these technologies to protect copyright given the encrypted content and the decryption key are in the attackers home.
It is only law abiding citizens who are impacted by these technologies, not those who wish to infringe copyright. I can only conclude that copyright infringement is being used as a scare tactic to introduce legal protection for technologies being abused to bypass other laws that protect Canadians.
Mr. Sookman ignores much of the debate that is happening outside of Canada, including how controversial the DMCA legislation is within the U.S.A. This includes many of the industries that were proponents of these laws in the past and are recognizing that they misunderstood the consequences. While the USTR is still lobbying based on a decade-old ideology, many in the U.S.A. have moved forward. We should be learning from this experience.
I also urge political parties of all stripes to support reforms that will usher in a new era of innovation, cultural advancement and economic growth for Canada. This means a rejection of the backward-facing reforms proposed by the incumbent industries that Mr. Sookman commercially represents.
Russell McOrmond
Ottawa, Ont.
(The letter-writer is policy coordinator for Canada’s Association for Open Source).