Mike Masnick notes that a grassroots coalition seems to have killed Canada’s version of the DMCA. Of course, legislation backed by powerful interest groups is never dead for good, but for now, it looks like Canada will be DMCA-free for the foreseeable future.
It’s worth remembering that when the actual DMCA was passed here in the US 10 years ago, it faced very little serious opposition. Part of that is probably because Slashdot and the rest of the tech blogosphere was still in its infancy. But I think it’s also a sign of how much progress has been made in spreading awareness about copyright issues and getting non-geeks interested and engaged. I remember organizing an anti-DMCA organization at the University of Minnesota in the wake of the 2001 Sklyarov arrest and struggling to explain to non-techies what the DMCA was and why they should care about it.
The DMCA still isn’t a household concept yet, but knowledge and understanding of the DMCA and other copyright issues is a lot more widespread than it was a decade ago. And at least up North they’ve figured out how to translate that broader public interest into effective political advocacy. If the copyright reform movement continues growing over the next decade the way it has over the last decade, I think there’s a real chance that we’ll be able to stop the otherwise-inevitable Copyright Term Extension Act of 2018. I had sort of resigned myself to perpetual copyright extension, but ideas have consequences, and the debate may become so lopsided by 2018 that even the copyright industry’s millions may not be enough to buy them another 20 years of monopoly rents.
It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that vigorous prosecution of the war on file sharing will lead to some deeply illiberal results. And our good friends at the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s Center for Digital Property periodically write things that confirm the point. Former PFFer Patrick Ross, for example, has compared the war on file sharing to America’s “lax” approach to drug law enforcement. And last year Jim DeLong made the argument that stopping file sharing will require copyright laws so draconian that they will make today’s laws, including the DMCA and lawsuits against 12-year-olds, look “ridiculously permissive.”
PFF’s new copyright guru, Tom Sydnor, seems to be equally enthusiastic about using ever-more-draconian legal penalties and restrictions on civil liberties in order to back up his vision of copyright. His latest target is online anonymity, as he argues that Boston University is guilty of “incompetence” for allowing anonymous communications on its network:
For those seeking to enforce federal laws or rights other than copyrights, this order is all bad news. London-Sire suggests that BU has made its campus network into a de-facto safe harbor for anyone using the Internet to commit any crime. It would seem that terrorists, pedophiles, phishing-scheme operators, hackers, identity thieves, and copyright pirates who can access the Internet through BU’s network now have a get-out-of-jail-free card–a judicial decision holding that any identifying data provided by BU is too hopelessly unreliable to support so much as the filing of a civil lawsuit.
What’s amazing about this argument is that it proves way, way too much: it applies to
any network provider that allows customers to communicate without identifying themselves first. So, for example, the Panera down the street from me offers anonymous, free WiFi access. Terrorists, pedophiles, phishing-scheme operators, hackers, identity thieves, and copyright pirates can walk into Panera, commit a variety of crimes, and walk out, and in all likelihood Panera won’t be able to provide the police with any useful information about the culprit. (Panera might have logs showing the user’s MAC address, but these are not easy to match to an individual, and they can be spoofed anyway)
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