Bill wrote:
Hi folks, I'm working with the Vancouver Fair Copyright Coalition herein Canada to fight Bill C-61 (The Canadian DMCA) and the ACTA treaty. I'm compiling a list of occasions when it is necessary to circumvent various forms of copyright protections for *legitimate* professional reasons. If you have had reason to infringe or circumvent copyright please reply to me off list with a short message giving details of its type, need and purpose. All confidential.tia, b.
Regarding this Bill C-61, I believe circumventing any copy protection mechanism will make the user a criminal.
That means, if I play a Compact Audio Disc I bought which has a copy protection mechanism built-in (by Sony*, for example) in a Linux machine, I would have successfully circumvented the copy protection (the little program they have on the disc does not run on Linux, and IIRC, neither on Mac OSX). Hence, under Bill C-61, it appears that playing such CDs on Linux will be a criminal activity!
->HS(*) I actually bought a copy of such discs a few years ago before I realized what was wrong with them. In fact, I was lucky not to have harmed my machines by running the discs in Windows (I disabled the auto run feature from all Windows installations at my home comps). Furthermore, it is easy to find via google how to disable such copy protection by just drawing a black thick (about 3~5 mm) ring at the circumference of the disc with a black permanent marker -- again, a criminal activity under the new bill.