You’re wrong.

Bill C-61 expressly forbids people from importing or manufacturing tools that *CAN* circumvent a “technological measure”. What use is it if you’re allowed to do something, but forbidden tools that can actually do it?

This is the most insidious thing about C-61, and the one that rankles me the most - whenever someone points out the problem with a concrete example, fools who haven’t thought through the implications spring to it’s defense saying “oh, it doesn’t stop you from doing that.” No, but it *does* stop you from owning tools to do it.

also, we don’t have any interest in enforcing any particular usage or licensing scheme.

public domain has the beauty of being completely free of all strings, which is good. for more, see:
http://hughmcguire.net/2008/03/31/why-public-domain-and-not-creative-commons/

Public domain materials can be used by a publisher and then electronically “locked up” and then subject to the DMCA or C-61 if it becomes law.

Use of the GNU Free Documentation License requires that you have to pass the freedoms you received onto the next recipient and so on. Under the GNU FDL just like the GNU GPL used in software, nobody can ever take “free materials” and turn them into “non-free” materials.

Also, the bill gives all rights to the person/company who adds the DRM. It is up to you to prove the contents are public domain, but how can you do that without breaking DRM? So, its a gamble and if you are wrong you have violated the law.

There isn’t any restriction or penalty for applying DRM to someone else’s work, and there should be. There isn’t a penalty for falsely claiming copyrights over items contained in a DRM file, and there aren’t rules governing whether the content has to be 100% public domain. It’s simply poor law.

It also casts doubt onto the distribution method of using P2P. Given the risks, people will simply avoid P2P distribution, even over completely legitimate files. You don’t know ahead of time which contents are “illegal”, or which are acceptable. Many bands re-record songs by others and they pay a royalty to do so. But, did they? If they failed to pay and you still download the file, you broke copyright because of back-office negotiations in which you had no part.

Copyright permissions can change over time. Some works were put into the public domain by the original creator, only to have their descendants decide to impose harsh copyrights. Maybe that is ok, maybe not, and maybe it changes based by each countries legislation. So, suddenly we need to be international layers to understand which items are legal, and the onus is on us to be right, and with harsh penalties if we are wrong.

The SAFEST option is to avoid everything, since you never really know the copyright status for any particular IP. There are many different settings for copyright dispersal, but this law focuses on one type exclusively. It’s law built for the organizations like the RIAA and MPAA, and everyone else has to “let the market sort it out”. But, there is new risk in being part of that market, it’s not a free market (as in open).

It is a market that is demanded to cater to specific market requirements, of the strongest members of that market instead of the weakest.

The costs of litigating any part of it mean it isn’t likely to be contested.

Shouldn’t the bill expressly prohibit anyone but the “owner” from claiming ownership and placing limits on content they don’t own? That would be more to point, I think.

The problem is that while there may be no ‘owner’, there is a publisher who has denied consumers their rights by placing a lock on the public domain work. It is unlikely a judge is going to order a publisher to recall all copies which have illegal digital locks on them and to redistribute new copies of the work without the lock.

So until the ‘test’ case goes to trial and even years afterward, all those who acquired the version illegally ‘locked’ by the publisher will be denied their right of fair use. Who will compensate them for that loss?

Moreover, I’d also point out that under section 41.1(2) of the Bill, only the owner of the copyright in the work is entitled to seek a remedy against someone for circumventing, so even in the unlikely event that a TPM applied to a public domain work was deemed to be a “technological measure”, as the work has no owner, no one would be capable of bringing an action for its circumvention.