Apr 292012
I am not the activist type, but I admit I am a little distressed by the fact that no Canadian events appear to be planned on The Day Against DRM.
The reason for my distress? Our federal government is about to enact into law Bill C-11, a bill that will make the simple act of copying a DVD to your computer for convenient viewing, or viewing a DVD purchased abroad using “region free” software, criminally illegal.
While I agree that C-11 sounds like a Bad Thing, is this not a situation similar to jaywalking, where unless you are dumb enough to commit the violation right in front of an enforcement officer, the state simply does not have the capacity to notice violations? (Unless they are specifically looking at you anyway, in which case you are screwed, regardless … :-( )
Yes, you are right. We are unlikely to ever “get caught” for copying a DVD to our hard drives or viewing a foreign region coded DVD on a PC with the help of some Chinese or Caribbean software. But… laws like this that criminalize everyday common behavior are Ayn Rand’s nightmare: a society in which everyone is a potential criminal.
On a more mundane note, copyright law is supposed to be a balanced bargain between society and the rights holder: in exchange for obtaining a limited monopoly protecting the work, the rights holder grants society certain rights (including “fair use”). By criminalizing the breaking of digital locks even when the intended usage would otherwise be lawful, they are basically negating all such provisions in the law and the monopoly becomes absolute. This, I think, is just plain wrong.