Copyright Bill C-32 op-eds
I haven’t had much time to write about the new proposed copyright bill (C-32). In short, it has some good things, but unfortunately, like the last proposed bill, everything it offers, it takes away (and then some) by elevating digital locks (DRM) to trump status.
Do you see what I see in the new copyright Bill C-32? Amid all the noise about new rights for users, upon closer scrutiny, this bill, rather than granting new rights, can effectively block users from making use of any and all of their rights, even existing ones. It is true that this bill now recognizes rights that we all thought we already had, like viewing our legally purchased Irish video in Canada, or playing our Leonard Cohen song on our CD and copying it to our iPod, or watching Desperate Housewives on Monday instead of Sunday evening. But even the new rights granted to teachers to use excerpts from Catcher in the Rye or clips from the Anne of Green Gables television show are meaningless if vendors choose to use a digital lock.
The problem here is twofold. Practically, it puts all the power in the hands of digital content creators. They can wave a wand and – more or less arbitrarily – declare their content locked and beyond the reach of the hoi polloi and their “fair use.”
But more important, I think, is the fact that giving locks special legal status doesn’t make intuitive sense. If you want people to follow a law in their day-to-day lives, and you don’t want to create a police state to enforce it, you have to meet them halfway on the grounds of moral reasoning. And turning digital locks into unbreakable magic seals – as opposed to judging what the user does after they break a lock – is counterintuitive.
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