Fair Dealing

Part 1 of the inevitable response to Bill C-61. See also parts 2, 3.

kj | 2008-07-01

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper

Office of the Prime Minister
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa K1A 0A2

cc: Hon. Jim Prentice, http://pintday.org/archive/20080701

Mr. Harper:

I am writing you, my Member of Parliament, to proffer my strenuous objections to Bill C-61, recently introduced by the Honourable Jim Prentice.

First, allow me to offer some background about myself: My name is Kjell Wooding. I’m the co-editor of the weekly serial pintday.org (ISSN 1703-5511). I am an academic (a Ph.D. candidate at present). I am a Computer Engineer and Entrepreneur. Intellectual property—both the production and the consumption of—is very important to me in all of these endeavors.

Mr. Harper, I believe in the notion of copyright, as a limited and balanced trade-off between the producers and consumers of content. If you will forgive the reference to another country’s laws, I find the purpose of copyright to be most succinctly stated in the United States Constitution; i.e.

“to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

My objection to Bill C-61 is very simple. I believe the delicate tradeoff between the needs of content producers and consumers is utterly devastated by the language in the new bill—specifically, the language around technological measures and rights management information, colloquially referred to as Digital Rights Management (DRM). I have heard the talking points on both sides of this issue, Mr. Harper, and I think the easiest way to illustrate why I believe the needs of the content consumer have been gutted is through example. That is why I have decided to write this letter in a number of parts.

For each of the next few weeks, I will be detailing numerous examples of how the proposed bill adversely affects the rights of the Canadian content consumer, the needs of the academic researcher, the security of the average Canadian consumer, and the preservation and well-being of Canadian Culture as a whole. I do not believe I am going too far in making these claims, as I hope the my subsequent communications will make clear.

Thank-you for you continued attention and patience in this matter. I look forward to communicating with you over the next few weeks. I hope by the end you and your party will agree that Bill C-61 will do more damage than good in its current form.

Yours Truly,

kj

July 1, 2008
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One Response to “Fair Dealing”

  1. Collette Says:
    July 15th, 2008 at 11:28 pm

    You rock, Kjell.

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