When did copyright law become sexy? Jim Prentice must be wondering. This week, Canada's freshly shuffled Industry Minister was set to table new copyright legislation that could have completely changed the relationship between Canadians and their digital media. But then he backed down, at least until the end of the year.
Maybe it had something to do with the furor over what that bill was said to have contained. Maybe it was related to the flash mob that descended on his Calgary office last weekend. Maybe he just didn't think that copyright legislation could capture the public imagination. It would be hard to blame him if that were the case; at politician school, they don't teach you to watch out for that third rail of Canadian politics, “anti-circumvention legislation.”
Suddenly, though, circumvention is a word that people are getting hot and bothered about. As anyone who has bought music from Apple has learned the hard way, companies are in the business of putting technological locks on their content. The classic example is songs bought on iTunes, which have built-in limits on where they can be played (iPods only!) and how they can be copied (hardly at all). The happy euphemism for this technique is Digital Rights Management, or DRM.
Where there's DRM, however, there's someone out there who is coming up with a way to circumvent its locks and get at the content hiding inside. Needless to say, once one person in the world has figured it out, the whole Internet gets in on the game. Soon, tools start appearing on websites that let average end users do things like copy movies from protected DVDs.
It's almost certain that a new law will make it illegal to dodge DRM schemes in some circumstances. This is a requirement of international treaties that Canada has signed, and adhering to them is one reason the law is getting overhauled in the first place. The question is how far the new law will go. After all, not every act of copying is necessarily a copyright violation. At the moment, Canadian law contains some limited exceptions for “fair dealing,” for things like instruction, reporting and personal use. It's not clear whether the new law would have any “fair dealing” provisions at all.
In fact, early reports suggested the federal government was planning to adopt an American-style law that would make it criminal to crack the protection on any media, period. Anything sitting around the house that's protected by Digital Rights Management technology would be automatically sacrosanct, and accessing it in ways not sanctioned by its maker – for any reason – could be against the law. This could include doing an end run around DRM for the most benign reasons, like watching an Asian-formatted DVD in Canada, or a film professor burning a DVD of movie clips for teaching purposes.
There's a lot more to copyright reform than laws against cracking DRM, but that's the part that seems to have grabbed people's attention. Surprise, surprise: The thought of making casual criminals of people who prod a piece of media in the wrong manner did not go down well. The thought that the contents of your personal video recorder might have certain unalienable rights is discomfiting, all right. Next up: habeas corpus for the CD rack.
Spearheaded by Michael Geist, the ubiquitous University of Ottawa law professor and blogger, the campaign has spawned a Facebook group that quickly racked up more than 17,000 signatories. Meanwhile, bloggers like Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow pounded the war drums in front of a global audience.
