Technological Protection Measures (TPMs) are the fortresses of code, silicon, and/or law that enforce Digital Rights Management (DRM). By not criminalizing (as a per se offense) the circumvention of TPMs, Canada keeps the doors open to innovation.
Period.
Innovation is not spontaneous. For all the lip-service we pay to the “spark” of creativity, it is a much more romantic notion that what we really see. In a vacuum, there is little, if any, innovation.
Why? Because in a vacuum there is no ether connecting the various things residing there. The DMCA, by legislating the right to extend property beyond its appropriate borders, creates a social vacuum. We lose the ether of interaction that allows us to build upon each others’ successes.
Without ICQ, we wouldn’t have MSN and Yahoo!. Without MSN, Yahoo!, etc., we wouldn’t have MySpace. Without all of those social networking and template-page predecessors, we wouldn’t have Facebook, or the impetus for the (mainly open source) blogosphere.
Without Palm, we wouldn’t have Research in Motion. Why? Because RIM built the Blackberry upon the lessons learned from Palm’s Pilot.
How does one thing build on another?
The inventor of the newer observes, reverse engineers, deconstructs, corrects, improves, and reconstructs the older. This is the gradual industrial and human process we call innovation. In other words, innovation is usually evolution, not revolution.
And it doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
Canada is an innovation Mecca. We are the home of such industrial trend setters as Research in Motion, Ballard Power Systems, and the largest video game development studio in the world, Electronic Arts’ Burnaby campus. Don’t think for a second that we have to follow the U.S.’s draconian IP regime in order to have any high-tech development.
We’re doing just fine as we are, and if we promote our nation as a place where innovation trumps propertization, we will continue to be a world leader.
Not to mention that we still respect individual users’ rights (including inventors’ rights!) – at least for the time being.
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