User:John64/FSOSS Paper

John Ford's FSOSS Paper

Open Source and Copyright Policy

This talk was done by David Fewer. He is legal counsel for the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic. He was speaking about how open source development is affected by copyright law, specifically, the Canadian Software Innovation Alliance. This is an organization that encourages government to continue to support the open software industry which has enabled Canadian developers to have a competitive advantage compared to developers of more restricted countries like the USA. A point that was stressed was that copyright law is about balancing the rights of consumers and the compensation of the author. Licensing and copyright laws need to have limits and exceptions to ensure that consumers are protected. Three essential exceptions and limits are the ability to enforce a license, ability reverse engineering and the ability to interoperate with other technologies.

These new anti-circumvention laws would severely hinder competition in the market place. Currently, Canada has a very hands-off attitude towards consumer protection where it is believed that if consumers feel that they are not being treated fairly they will not purchase the product and that the market will protect itself. This is a flawed ideal in the context of the proposed legal framework as the market will no longer be open to competitors and will stifle innovation at every point possible. It is suggested that Canada need to have a much stronger consumer protection voice in government. I believe that part of this problem is that for people to be able to make decisions as to which products to support, they must have an understanding of the product at a conceptual level. This is fairly easy with tangible goods like a car but very difficult with intangibles like software. This is especially true in an ecosystem where proprietary, closed solutions are considered to be not only the norm, but the ideal.

An important concept which was discussed was that copyright laws and patent laws are very different. Copyright laws protect the expression of an idea where patent laws protect invention and innovation. This is highlighted in the interoperability exception, where the ideas are being locked up by a new level of protection which removes the ability to look at the implementation of a technology. Currently there is a fair dealings exception in copyright law which allows for reverse engineering for the purposes of interoperability. These are all things which would be removed by a new copyright law. These new proposed anti-circumvention laws protect the technologies which protect content. This brings the number of layers of protection to three. There is the copyright law which protects the content, technological locks which protect the copyright and now anti-circumvention laws which protect the technological locks. The laws proposed in Canada with bill C-61 represent the strongest anti-circumvention laws anywhere in the world. They are even more severe than those which are embodied in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A previously proposed law, bill C-60, was brought up by the Liberal government which would have balanced, only targeting non-fair dealing actions. Unfortunately, the new Conservative government has included their version of the bill in their election platform, and even with a minority government, will likely be able to push it through.

As a lawyer, I believe that David’s view on open source is that people should be treated fairly and just. I do not believe that he is an open source or free software zealot but does believe in the principals of these movements. He seems to have a great understanding of the balance between the need to have open software and fair compensation of the author. He believes that copyright laws should be fair and should properly balance the values of the authors and the consumers.