By J.D.R. Brown (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: November 23, 2011
Since the very beginning of Stephen Harper’s mandate in 2006, copyright reform has been “on the agenda.” But with every election call, every prorogation, all the introduced bills aimed at reforming copyright have died an inglorious death on the order paper. With their majority win this past spring, the latest iteration of their copyright reform has risen from the ashes and found its way onto a fast-tracked legislative agenda. But whatever benefits students and educators stand to gain with this new reform bill, there remains one gigantic loophole that undermines absolutely everything – digital locks.
Once upon a time digital locks were called DRM, or “digital rights management,” and were first used in the late 1990s by content producers to prevent unauthorized copying. The DVD was the first major piece of media to have a digital lock built in, but most of the early uses for digital locks were restricted to software. If a person pirated a copy of Windows XP, they would need a keycode to install and use it successfully. Such a system was not particularly sophisticated, and almost all of these were cracked and circumvented quite quickly.
Things have gotten more complicated as sophisticated encryption software has become freely available and computing power has increased in everything from phones to toasters. Now, most digital locks include some type of (usually public key) encryption. This effectively seals off the content to anyone who does not have a proper key for said digital lock, thereby forcing people to legitimately pay whatever for access. The problem is that these digital locks simply do not work and by giving them legal protections, the government will be criminalizing the every day activities of millions of citizens, especially students.
The new copyright bill has an education exemption specifically mentioned under its fair dealing provisions. This means that students and educators are able to access and use otherwise copyrighted material for free for purposes of teaching and research. (This is not explicit in our current copyright legislation). But the digital locking provision is written in such a way that makes it completely illegal to circumvent it – for whatever purpose, even exercising one’s right to fair dealing for education. This means that if you are downloading a PDF article from JSTOR and want to put it on your Kindle or iPad in addition to your computer, you will be infringing upon copyright if that article has a lock placed on it. Absurd!
But the dirty little secret in all of this is that digital locks are conceptually broken. Say you’ve locked your valuables in a box. Okay, your stuff is safe there so long as you have the key and no one else does. But what if you want all of your friends to see what you have in the box? Well, then you have to make them a copy of the key. But there is no way for you to know which friend is trustworthy before you give the keys away, and then when you do give the keys away there is nothing preventing one of your friends from losing it or giving it away. The result is that as soon as keys are distributed to any degree, the actual lock becomes meaningless.
And that’s what happens with digital locks. Disney wants everyone to see its movies, and Sony wants everyone to listen to its music. Would Disney release a DVD that could only work for one person? Not a chance.
The solution is to simply abolish digital locks, or at least make their circumvention legal for legitimate purposes. Their protection is an unnecessary infringement upon our freedom.
