Well here’s what I’m sending to Lee Richardson…

—

Mr. Lee Richardson
CONSTITUENCY OFFICE
Suite 105,
1410 11th Ave. SW
Calgary, Alberta
T3C 0M8
Tel: (403) 244-1880
Fax: (403) 245-3468
e-mail: richal1@parl.gc.ca

Dear Lee Richardson,

As a 37 year old software programmer, I’d like to share with you a concern I have with the new Canadian copyright bill (C-61).

It appears this bill denies citizens the right to circumvent copy protection measures, and bans any tools used to circumvent copy protection.

I wrote Jim Prentice in December of 2007 to express my concern with getting the government involved in a technological battle. While the legislation appears to allow citizens to time-shift and backup media, it only does so when no counter measures have been taken. So, if a “lock” has been placed on digital content, these rights suddenly dissipate.

Digital locks do not work. They have never worked. There are easy locks to pick, and hard locks to pick. But they are always broken eventually.

I admire the creators of BluRay, iPod and anyone who can make a consumer device which can withstand anything more than a casual attack. And indeed, some devices can withstand an attack for years: The PS/3 and X-Box 360 have not suffered from the same levels of software piracy from which the PS/2 and original X-Box did. Such success is due to massive R&D and lessons learned from their earlier versions.

But such success on behalf of Sony and Microsoft is because they put in effort to make their systems harder to crack. They didn’t put a crappy little lock on their game systems, they worked to make them more secure. While I personally think DRM is a poor investment (as it makes a company’s products less attractive to consumers), if a company wants to spend the R&D on DRM… well it’s their money.

The scenario I’d hate to see, is that of a media company executing poor copy protection which can be easily broken, and then the Canadian government is called in to enforce it. Such poor copy protection could be found on HD DVD, where a few lines of code and the key “09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0″ were all that was needed to break the protection. Such shoddy protection is the norm, not the exception. And C-61 protects both equally.

I don’t expect the Canadian government to try determine which copy protection schemes are strong enough to be worthy of federal protection. I expect you to recognize as a Conservative, this is an area where government intervention is not required.

I fully support any efforts to stop sales of pirated content. Its the right of any manufacturer to use DRM in their hardware, and any media company to prevent copying of their works. I write software. I’d like to receive income for every copy of my apps being used. And if I found someone selling pirated copies of my software, I’d happily take them to court. But if I employed copy protection on my software, I know the same tools which would be ultimately be used to defeat my copy protection are also tools used to reverse engineer, understand, and ultimately develop more software.

Such distinctions between programming tools, network troubleshooting tools and hacking tools are not easy to make. Nor is it easy to define exactly what constitutes copy protection… I can whip up something in 10 minutes which can be broken in 5. Before C-61 is passed, I hope you find time to investigate how messy and complicated this will ultimately become, instead of finding out after it is passed.

Thank you for your time,
-Gordon McDowell [contact info removed]