Abolish Anti-Circumvention Restriction and Laws

Text of the Policy

 * The ‘Digital Locks’ provision will be removed from the Copyright Act.
 * Circumventing locks on media and the production of tools to do so will be held to be legal.
 * Media with digital locks must be visibly labelled as such.

Rationales

 * Under current copyright law it is unlawful to do various things aimed at circumventing effective technological measures that restrict access to copyrighted material, even if doing so is required for lawful use. This includes both civil liabilities and criminal offences. DRM is ineffective in stopping copyright infringement but have been used to create malicious codes (Sony's DRM Rootkit on CD), unauthorized spying, and TO protect proprietary interest against those of consumers and competitors.
 * DRM is a security risk open to abuses (such as creation of undetected backdoors).
 * Forbidding reverse engineering and discovery and reporting of flaws put a user's personal data, network and devices securities at risk.

Snippet of Discussions

 * A lot of anti-circumvention law being pushed by U.S. industry will have deleterious effects on researchers and IT security whistleblowers. We would abolish any law or treaties that criminalizes circumvention of digital lock.
 * Bill Gates and Steve Jobs made their money by reverse engineering and tinkering. We will not deny future generations the ability to tinker and break digital lock. Digital locks could be used to prevent auditing of the security of a proprietary and closed source system. And based on reactions of some major companies who are embarrassed by leak of their secruity flaws, some are likely to react by prosecuting the security whistleblowers as criminals and felons.

Possible Misinformations
Myth: It stops copyright infringement.  Fact: It does not stop copyright infringement. It just makes it harder for people to freely use the DRM product they've paid for. While allowing companies to unconstitutionally access people's private data without cause or authorization. It harms fair use and libraries age old tradition of free access to information.

Related News or Articles

 * New Copyright's Anti-Circumvention Law May Have Made U.S. Netflix Illegal In Canada
 * DRM as Information Access Barrier
 * What Happens with Digital Rights Management in the Real World? (Guardian)
 * DRM and the Law - Security Blog by Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society

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