From BoingBoing.net:
Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice introduced his answer to the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act today as planned, and it’s even worse than the US DMCA. The Canadian DMCA allows every single exception to copyright to be eliminated by adding DRM: whatever the law allows you to do, a corporation can take away, just by using DRM to prevent you from doing it. Breaking DRM is illegal, unless you fit into a tiny, narrow, useless exception for security research.
Yes, that’s right — the new copyright law being introduced does have provisions for making backups of your media, and fair use UNLESS the creator of that media puts a digital lock (DRM) on it. Which they all will. Which makes the exceptions worthless.
More information from BoingBoing:
This is even worse than the approach the US DMCA took ten years ago, and look where that’s got them. Tens of thousands of Americans have been sued, key innovative technology companies have been destroyed, computer scientists have been jailed, and what did it get them? Certainly not an end to infringement — file-sharing is up in every country in the world. And for all the money the record industry has harvested from tech startups and music fans, not one dime has been paid to an artist.
As I’ve said before on this blog, industry-led actions like this are the thrashing about of dying dinosaurs. The Internet and digital commerce means an end to the companies that have taken control away from creators, and they know it and they’re trying everything they can to maintain their bottom line — including lobbying for disgusting new laws like this.
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