Battlegoat studios criticizes C-32 digital locks provision

The head of a small video game developer in Ontario says he doesn’t support the way the Conservative government’s Bill C-32 proposes to protect digital locks. “Unfortunately, Section (47) of C-32, which adds the new Technological Protection Measures regulations, is so inherently flawed and unbalanced that it not only overshadows the progress in other sections of the bill, but in facts eliminates them by its ‘over-riding’ nature,” George Geczy, co-founder and co-owner of Battlegoat Studios in Ancaster, Ont., wrote in a position paper posted on his company website. The Conservative government introduced a long-awaited copyright reform bill last month that proposes strict legal protections for “digital locks”—also known as digital rights management or technological protection measures. Although the bill proposes new exceptions for copyright users, critics of the bill point out that the digital locks provision overrides proposed and existing user exceptions in the law. Industry Minister Tony Clement and Heritage Minister James Moore released the bill last month at the offices of video game developer Electronic Arts in Montreal, where they said that some sectors, like the gaming industry, rely on legal protection for digital locks to sustain their business models. But Geczy wrote that the provision protecting digital locks should be amended so that locks may be circumvented “for non-infringing uses.” Geczy said the provision would still meet the requirements of the Internet treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization and “properly permit consumers to use their Fair Dealing rights and exceptions. It would still afford protection to content creators and publishers, especially against the ‘large scale’ infringement that Ministers Moore and Clement say are the targets of Copyright Reform.” Gezney added that “customers must be able to have tools to balance Industry actions,” and that, without these tools, “content distributors have unreasonable control over products consumers purchase.” He noted in the paper that “all my income at the present and for the foreseeable future is from the sale of creative content protected by copyright.”

Battlegoat studios criticizes C-32 digital locks provision

Brief | July 6, 2010

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Battlegoat studios criticizes C-32 digital locks provision

Brief | July 6, 2010

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