Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic
CopywriteRevisionQ
Copyright Revision and Innovation
Copyright law is meant to balance the rights of users of copyrighted works and the rights of owners of such works. Yet, Canadian copyright history is one of ever-expanding control of copyright owners over their works with little attention to users' rights. The last Parliament saw a continuation of this trend.
Users' rights are key drivers of innovation. Failure to address innovation issues in copyright revision threatens Canadians' technology economy.
Other countries have adopted stronger controls, but also have stronger rights for citizens and users. For example, Americans enjoy fair use rights, which clearly allow for reverse engineering, and interoperability and security research. Canada's fair dealing provisions, on the other hand, do not squarely address innovators' needs to access copyright protected works.
Question
Do you support Canadian innovators' rights to reverse engineer or otherwise deal with a work for the purposes of security or interoperability research?
Reference
Party Responses (in order received)
Christian Heritage Party
Yes. Excessive protectionism inhibits innovation. That benefits no one. Reverse engineering for security or interoperability is not the same as copying.
Marijuana Party
It is true that the fair dealing clause in the Canada Copyright Act is much more restrictive than the American "fair use" Common Law defense. But what appears even more problematic to us, is the very narrow guidelines with regards to educational institutions. Art 29.4 (1) appears totally outdated, and we recently noticed that some teachers in Canadian universities now openly defy their copyright/royalties obligations because it seriously hampers their work. (By the way, do not expect students struggling to make ends meet to go and complain that they haven't paid all the usual fees!) Universities, as long as they remain independent from their funders, are a hotbed of innovation, and provisions of the Canada Copyright Act dealing with educational institutions should be revised as soon as possible.
As you may know, the Marijuana Party is against cannabis prohibition, because prohibition is unenforceable, unscientific and is an arbitrary way of excluding certain natural substances from the market economy, to the benefit of patented drugs and genetically modified organisms. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of Canadians do not feel "morally compelled" to comply with a legislation that violates their basic rights.
We thus fear Canada is heading in the same direction with regards to intellectual property. The current system favors wealthy patent and digital rights owners (and their lawyers!) But in the meantime the willingness of the general public to comply with the law is eroding, since giant DR owners like Sony or Microsoft are also flooding the marketplace with very profitable Minidiscs, DVD burners, 500G hard drives and other gizmos that make piracy as easy as 1, 2, 3. This is all very confusing! What is a 15 year old youth supposed to think?
Eventually, the disrespect of rigid intellectual property rights which is plaguing the entertainment sphere, may spill over and affect the research and educational fields as well. More flexibility in the law is definitely needed.
Communist Party
Yes but measures must be put in place to protect intellectual property rights within reason.
Green Party
The Green Party believes that Canada needs legislation similar to the fair use laws enjoyed in the United States in order to support innovators' rights. Because such activities as data and file sharing result in losses for artists, it is important that we implement a surcharge on data transfer, which would then be channeled back to the artists themselves. The Green Party of Canada proposes a system of website certification to distinguish between sites that observe copyright laws and pay for access to data and sites that do not. A surcharge on bandwidth transfer would then be implemented for uncertified sites that are transferring significant quantities of copyrighted data.
Liberal Party
The Liberal Party of Canada supports an effective, open and growth oriented approach to technology protection measures.
NDP
This page last updated: June 2, 2007
