The electoral district in which I live is called “Vancouver Centre.” My elected representative is the Honourable Member of Parliament, Dr. Hedy Fry. Dr. Fry is something of an activist; she has always been an outspoken representative of her constituents. Generally, I like her. I vote for her.
A fellow constituent of Vancouver Centre, Chuck LeDuc Diaz, runs a blog called Mad Analogy. At his blog, he posted a letter he received from Dr. Fry in response to a letter he sent her informing her of his concerns regarding Bill C-61, An Act to Americanize Amend the Copyright Act.
Chuck’s post dealing with, and including, Dr. Fry’s letter:
http://www.madanalogy.com/2008/07/hedy-fry-on-c-61-canadian-dmca.html
Dr. Fry’s criticisms of C-61 are not shy:
This Bill does not serve either consumer or creator well. It prescribes narrow, punitive solutions to a complex problem. In fact the Bill could well have the effect of curbing the use of digital technology, to the extent that it becomes useless. This would be a pity! As well implementation of the measures in the Bill would be nearly impossible, unless one abandons all privacy rights or imposes locks on the digital technology that severely limits [sic] its application. How to monetize digital technology to reward the creator and allow free and open use by the consumer is challenging.
Dr. Fry’s fears are correct, I would like to assist her on one political point: It would behoove her to trumpet Canada’s present privacy laws – leading examples on a global scale – of the protection of individual information rights vis-a-vis both government and (here’s where we really shine) corporations. The potential damage to privacy rights not only brings us more in line with a U.S. capitalist-fundamentalist approach to privacy, it damages our international reputation, which has made us an ideal trading partner for European companies who cannot infringe their own national policies through trade. In other words, European companies like to trade with us because our privacy laws make it easy for them to keep themselves clean by their own standards.
Dr. Fry criticizes the Conservatives total lack of public consultation during the composition of Bill C-61. I am not a big fan of copyright amendments proposed under her government, but to be fair, there was little consultation either public or private (other than with the family of Lucy Maud Montgomery), and neither was there much public outcry. Thus there wasn’t as much demand from the public to be consulted.
Such has not been the case with C-61. Fair Copyright for Canada, a Facebook-based lobby group demanding public consultation, apparently holds records for membership growth. Conservative Industry Minister Jim Prentice, the man at whose feet the buck stops for Copyright reform, has been harangued in public over the Bill. He has also embarrassed himself on CBC Radio when questioned about it. University of Ottawa Law Professor Michael Geist has reached something like celebrity status for his public calls to arms against the Bill. There is ample evidence that the public wishes to be consulted on this matter. This is not an esoteric niche of arcane law. This affects everyone with a CD player, an mp3 player, a library card, a VCR, a computer, and even a cellular phone. This Bill cuts to the heart of a society entering a new era, one in which information is both a guarded commodity and an unmitigable river of change, freedom, and knowledge.
My concern with Dr. Fry’s response to Mr. LeDuc Diaz is in her description of the balance needed to be struck:
Bill C-61 should strike a balance between the right of creators to be reimbursed for their creative, intellectual property and the desire for consumers to have access to these creative works.
I suggest the following recasting of that view to Dr. Fry:
Bill C-61 should strike a balance between the right of the public to have access to creative works, and the desire of creators to be reimbursed for their creative, intellectual property. Intellectual property does not naturally vest, but is an artificial trust put into the hands of information modellers in order to allow them to profit for a limited time.
The clay from which creators create their works, and the means by which the public interpret, appreciate, consume, and give value to those works, is all public. Words, colours, musical notes, and the natural sciences are all in the public domain. Only the manipulation of those natural and public phenomena into individual expressions is creative; profiting from it is not a right, but a privilege granted for the sake of progress.
I thank Dr. Ken Cavalier for his insight into viewing intellectual property through a lens of trust law. If only parliament shared that insight.
Loading ...