Michael Geist calls on us to ‘ Speak Out on the Trans Pacific Partnership Negotiations‘.
My brief letter to the provided response address (consultations@ international.gc.ca) was as follows:
Re COPYRIGHT ISSUES
Please take note of my very strong opposition to any agreement which either extends the term of copyright protection for existing works,
or extends the criminalization of digital lock beaking for purposes in particular of maintaining access to legally acquired content via any medium of the user’s choice and more generally for any purpose that would not otherwise be criminal (including any use that does not violate a copyright).
Thank you.
Alan Cooper
(And by the way, the address on the gov’t website has a space which makes copying it not work – perhaps inserted deliberately to discourage responses?)
Actually I could live with “protection” of digital locks IF, and ONLY if, it only applied to media on the packaging for which the fact that the product works only on specifically identified devices was displayed in larger and clearer print than any other aspect of content description.
But the issue of copyright extension drives me really mad! This is just a gift of cash stolen from the public to whomever owns the rights half a century after the author’s death and obviously does not contribute in any way to the original authorship and funding decisions that were made more than half a century earlier. With sufficient data it might be possible to convince me that longer copyright terms for future works would help increase creative output, but there is no way that this applies to works already written and the benefit of an extension is often being given to someone who purchased rights from the author on the basis of a shorter term of protection. If copyright is extended, then authors (and estates) who sold rights with a shorter term should be entitled to sue for recovery of whatever value is provided by the extension.