Cory Doctorow proposes that Canada break ranks with international IP law enforcement
Cory recommends a response for Canada to the USA's promised tariffs: break ranks on oppressive IP laws and build a local right-to-repair economy.
Edit: Corrected link. Sorry about that!
You're viewing a single thread.
While I think this is a good idea (because copyright is a stupid concept in the digital age), the problem with this proposal is that Europe is also very pro-copyright. Doing something like this would probably piss off Americans, but if it also pisses off your next best ally as well, it's probably not going to work out.
Copyright isn't a stupid concept in the digital age, if anything it's more important than ever but it is grossly out of control and needs to be severely curtailed (along with all other IP law). Copyright needs to go back to what it was originally intended as, a short term monopoly on a creative work. Something like 10 to 20 years. The current 100+ year copyright durations are absolutely ridiculous and never should have been allowed.
Copyright has always been a stupid law in the digital age. Copying is an essential part of many processes. The focus on individual copies has been nonsense for decades when the real focus even for those short term licenses (and I agree with you there) should be who is allowed to use the content and for what purpose (e.g. public showing to large crowds might be more expensive than common friend or family groups at home). Also, pretty much anything about copy protection is complete nonsense in the current laws.
We also desperately need to prevent companies from using that monopoly to prevent older works from being available by having the copyright and not publishing the work anymore since this is killing our cultural history.
You're being too literal with the term copyright. Fundamentally what copyright has always been about is preventing someone else using your work for their own gain without your permission. In that respect yes, copyright is critical in the digital age. The problem is that it's a compromise. It balances the rights of someone who has "purchased" a copyrighted work with the rights of the creator.
Generally the balance that has been struck is that as a purchaser you have the right to do anything that you want with a work except to sell a duplicate of that work. You can sell the work, so long as you no longer retain a copy of it yourself. In practice this means transferring rather than copying. How exactly that's accomplished gets into the weeds a bit if you start splitting hairs, but what's important here is the spirit of the thing, nobody is going to care if technically you both have a copy for some short period of time in the middle of the transfer process.
As for "copy protection" aka DRM that is and always has been complete bullshit because it is a fundamentally intractable problem. There's exactly one way to enforce copyright and that's the legal system, anything else is doomed to failure.
We also desperately need to prevent companies from using that monopoly to prevent older works from being available by having the copyright and not publishing the work
This is solved by limiting copyright to a short duration after which the work enters the public domain. If a company wants to squander a copyright by sitting on it for the limited time they have it that's fine but they're only hurting themselves. The only reason this is an issue now is because of the ridiculous century long copyright terms we currently have. If copyright was reduced to a decade you would never see this happening anymore. That said a safeguard should also be in place to prevent copyright being used as a censorship weapon by the wealthy. I think a "use it or lose it" clause that immediately enters a work into the public domain if it's not available for some period of time (maybe a couple years) would nip any potential issues there in the bud.
Author doesn't say ignore copyrights. He says ignore the "broad IP" clause in USMCA. Right to repair, right to have your own app store, right to enhance products you own.
Or just revise the law to state that international copyrights will only be enforced if they are held by Canadian trading partners in good standing, and that the only prosecutable violations of those copyrights are those which have taken place during the most recent contiguous period that that partner has been in good standing.
That way we don't need to keep updating the law every time a trading partner starts/stops acting up, and other trading partners won't need to worry about impacts to their IP. It will simply be baked in that every time a trading partner unilaterally breaks a trade agreement with us they will in effect be granting amnesty to every Canadian citizen who ever breached their copyright in the past and creating an open season on their IP within Canada until they can reach a new mutually acceptable trade agreement. Honestly this should be a standard practice for many countries.
Make it a law that comes into effect in 2 years. Put them on notice.