Hill Times Letter: Liberals make it tough to like them

Letter to the Hill Times Editor published January 16, 2006

Re: “Grits want a policy platform, angry about national campaign,” (The Hill Times, Jan. 9).

I live in Ottawa South, and the Liberal Party is making it very hard for me if I wanted to vote for incumbent David McGuinty. While the Liberals don’t have policy documents, the party has answered critical technology law questions that The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) asked.

The Liberals started by insulting us on their answer to the first question, entirely dismissing the concerns of many Canadians, including computer and security experts.

While technical measures are claimed to be used by copyright holders to protect their copyright, there are technical reasons why this goal can never be achieved. What is left is the hidden agenda of specific special interest groups, which is the desire to use technical measures and Digital Rights Management to circumvent privacy, competition, contract and other laws. There is already a successful U.S. class action suit for the harm caused by Sony-BMG copy control, as well as a Canadian class action suit, as well as a suit from the Texas Attorney General.

The growing awareness of the harm caused by this software, largely indistinguishable from SpyWare and other malware, is causing music fans to think twice before buying a CD. I believe that this issue is more likely to be the source of the decline the major labels are seeing than their scapegoat of unauthorized music sharing.

These technical measures circumvent computer security: the goal of computer security is to protect the owner of the computer from third parties, while the goal of technical measures are to protect third parties from the owner of the computer.

We also have a major accountability problem where the incumbent Liberal in Parkdale-High Park is caught in a scandal that upsets me far worse than the sponsorship issue.

Russell McOrmond
Ottawa, Ont.
(The letter-writer is the webmaster for digital-copyright.ca).