In response to a discussion in Hansard about Bill C-327, I wrote the following letter. (Please go to V-Chip Canada for information on that technology.)

Dear Ms. Tina Keeper, Member for Churchill, and Liberal Heritage Critic,

I noticed that on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 you participated in the debate on Bill C-327, An Act to amend the Broadcasting Act (reduction of violence in television broadcasts). In this discussion you discussed technologies that allowed for parental control such as the "V-chip". I would agree with what I believe you were suggesting, that the right way to solve the problem is to have the government mandate labelling on programming and then put technology in the hands of individual Canadians to allow them to make their own viewing choices, and to give parents the tools to restrict the viewing choices of their own children.

Unfortunately, the law and technology are headed in a different direction. Increasingly we are seeing device manufacturers taking control away from the owners of these technologies, often under the false pretence that revoking this control will somehow reduce copyright infringement. We are then seeing laws, such as the proposals that came out of the USA's National Information Infrastructure Task Force in 1995 that lead to the 1996 WIPO treaties, which legally prohibit the owners of these technologies from gaining control over what they own. These technologies cannot have two masters, and in order for Citizens to digitally secure (lock down) their own technology to obey their own instructions they must first remove any third party locks which are already on the technology.

Stewart Baker, Department of Homeland Security's assistant secretary for policy, said to a group of copyright holders about this critical policy conflict, "It's very important to remember that it's your intellectual property -- it's not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it's important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days."

I would like to meet to discuss this issue. The ratification of the 1996 WIPO treaties will not only harm the interests of a majority of creators and other copyright holders, and all digital device owners, but will also have serious implications on other public policy as well. It is hard to give parents the tools to make their own choices about their children's viewing habits when the technology involved will be under the exclusive control of the device manufacturers. Only when the interests of the parent and the manufacturer are aligned will these devices obey the instructions of parents.

Russell McOrmond - p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He's also the CLUE policy coordinator.]

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