Bill C-32 and Changes to Canadian Copyright

The (minority) Conservative government has again introduced a copyright bill, C-32. 

All in all, I'm not averse to what they've put in it with one exception, enshrining Technical Protection Measures (TPM or DRM) in the bill in such a way that its use trumps otherwise legal use of copyright materials.

I fear that, if this bill gets passed (and their's no guarantee that it will - the previous 2 have not) then we'll be saddled with TPM. In that case I want the following changes made to protect us from TPM's potentially devastating aspects:

1. must be 100% open source (source code published) - no hidden software hacks that rootkit my machine. No security by obscurity.
2. must have keys escrowed with the government in case the holder decides (a la Major League Baseball, Microsoft, etc.) to stop the key server some time - and also to allow for access after the legal copyright period ends and the work falls into the public domain 
3. must not be for reason of region control - in our global economy this is just plain theft 
4. if there is a portion of the TPM that must be on a piece of hardware that I otherwise own, then I may be able to remove it with impunity by giving up the facility it guards - i.e. if it contains a TMP chip and Windoze won't run without that chip - then I can remove the chip if I don't care to run Windoze. 
5. the TPM must be non-trivial. No Caesar cyphers or single bit "you can't copy this" flags
   
   
   TPM has been and still is the venue of snake-oil salesmen selling security by obscurity to technically ignorant content owners. Any sufficiently obscure technology is magic in their eyes - but most of it comes down to one thing: hide the key to the encrypted content somewhere.
   If it is on a piece of hardware, like a DVD player, then the key is in the hardware and can be found (and has been, see DeCSS) if you're persistent. If the key is on a network server somewhere then that server has to be available to you for you to view/listen to the content. If the server is down, or your internet connection is down, or you're somewhere there is no service, then you can't use the copyright content.
   And of course if the content is protected by TPM, chances are the TPM has no concept of time - it won't magically disappear 50 years or 75 years after the content was created (depending on which country and what portion of the Copyright act it falls under) and there sure isn't any logic in it to know if all you're doing is otherwise legal, such as any of the fair dealing exceptions in the Canadian act.
    
   And while we're at it, I think we should add a 6th provisio:
    
6. if a TPM is implemented on public domain content then the implementor is guilty of a crime

At least then there is some protection for people from unscrupulous TPM purveyors who sell ill-garnered personal information access along with "rights management". If nothing else this would remove a major incentive from the content holders; the one that I personally think is the major reason for TPM in the first place.

Tag: tpm drm copyright c-32 rootkit