CANADA'S PRIVACY COMMISSIONER WARNS ON COPYRIGHT ACTIONS

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BOING BOING - Jennifer Stoddart, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, has
published an open letter to Industry Minister Jim Prentice, who has been
working behind the scenes to resurrect his disaster of a copyright bill,
which will import the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act to Canada. The
DMCA has been a total failure, resulting in nearly 30,000 lawsuits
against music fans, massive anti-competitive effects, and despite all
that, no discernable decrease in unauthorized copying.

At issue in Stoddart's letter is the idea of protecting "Digital Rights
Management" anti-copying and use-control systems in law. These systems
frequently spy on users and then "phone home" with detailed information
about your activities. The Privacy Commissioner is understandably
alarmed at the prospect of changing Canadian law to make it illegal to
tamper with this spyware:

"If DRM technologies only controlled copying and use of content, our
Office would have few concerns. However, DRM technologies can also
collect detailed personal information from users, who often do no more
than access the content on a computer. This information is transmitted
back to the copyright owner or content provider, without the consent or
knowledge of the user. . .

"Technologies that report back to a company about the use of a product
reveal a great deal about an individual's tastes and preferences.
Indeed, such information can be extremely personal. Technologies that
automatically collect personal information about individuals without
their knowledge or consent violate the fair information principles . . .


http://www.boingboing.net/2008/01/20/canadian-privacy-com-1.html

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BUT CONGRESS PLOWS AHEAD TO PLEASE MOVIE & RECORDING CORPORADOS

BOING BOING - The Electronic Frontier Foundation warns us that the
College Opportunity and Affordability Act, is still steaming ahead with
its "Campus-based Digital Theft Prevention" that ties college funding to
universities' purchase of DRM-based industry-sanctioned download
services and deployment of network snoopware that spies on and
disconnects college kids if they appear to be violating copyright
(without any hard evidence or a chance for the student to present her
side of the story). . .

Advocates of the bill stress that the language stops short of demanding
implementation -- that it only requires universities to "plan" -- but
this argument misses the point entirely. The passage of this bill will
unambiguously lead universities down the wrong path. For the sake of
artists, administrators, students, and consumers better approaches
exist.

The bill also would hang an unspoken threat over the heads of university
administrators. In response to concerns that potential penalties for
universities could include a loss of federal student aid funding, the
MPAA's top lawyer in Washington said that federal funds should be at
risk when copyright infringement happens on campus networks. Moreover,
earlier versions of "Campus-based Digital Theft Prevention" proposals
nakedly sought to make schools that received numerous copyright
infringement notices subject to review by the US Secretary of Education.


http://www.boingboing.net/2008/01/20/congress-moving-forw.html

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