The Canada government wants to gut our property law and entrench digital squatters rights to wealthy American Oligarchs in all our personal electronic devices, be they computers, music players, televisions, book-readers for the blind, telephones, mapping and positioning devices, … — in short, anything containing electronics that will be manufactured in this century. The proposed new copyright law by the Federal Conservatives will encourage (nay, virtually mandate) all of our property to contain permanently running embedded agents of an oligarchy of rights-owning interests; agents that may not be removed by the property owner without threat of the severest criminal penalties and crippling fines. These agents will works against our interests to enforce the arbitrary will of these oligarchs in the supposed interest of copyright holders, with powers that vastly exceed that of copyright, and not even directly benefitting the actual producers of original material worthy of copyright. The agents will strictly control the day-to-day use of digital media, and deign such allowances as they permit.

If you own an old and valuable book that the pages are falling out of you can get it rebound. There is no copying going on so no copyright statutes apply. Not so with digital media. Old worn out devices will simply perish and take all your media with it. I can still play old vinyl LPs that I recorded onto magnetic tape years ago; the record player died years ago but tape players are still commonplace. In a nice compromise those magnetic cassettes I bought had a small surcharge that was shared out between recording companies. Even though the majority of the blank tapes I bought contained no copied music on at all, I didn’t mind the surcharge and took advantage of the ability to move music onto the more convenient tape format. The records belonged to me; the record player and cassette recorder belonged to me; the cassettes I recorded belonged to me and I never gave them to other people; the cassettes played without my having to ask permission. The law respected my discretion and I respected the law. Civil law that is. Civility being the key.

The word "rights" was gentrified in the eighteenth century. The word entered the english language along with the Norman Conquerers who exercised such rights as to "the right to squash any peasant", "the right to Harry the North" (i.e. kill all Northumbrians). Such rights were always followed by mounted cavalry and sharp swords. By Elizabethan time rights were handed out to royal favourites such as "the right to 10% tax on the imports of wine". Gentler but still enforced with a stick and the common man was always on the receiving end. Using the word in the sense of "human rights" was a cleverly crafted reversal by the reform minded until nowadays the word "rights" is surrounded by a warm fuzzy glow. The introduction of "Digital Rights Management" will bring back associations of royal favour and the sword.

We are to be subjugated to Encryption. It sounds harmless at first — who really cares that your DVD is encrypted or not; after all, it plays just the same. The rub lies in the DVD player — we can’t decrypt the DVD directly but the DVD player can and that player belongs to us and obeys our instructions. Except of course when it doesn’t. The proposed law will ensure that we no longer control the decrypting agents embedded in our own property. They will carry on their work for interests not our own, using hardware we bought and consuming electricity we pay for, communicating as they choose to their own masters, monitoring all aspects of our devices and applying their secret decoder keys only as they see fit, controlling our devices and disabling them on demand. All for interests south of the border. This is the gross assault on property laws that our Conservative government is contemplating.

In the absense of this hideous proposed legislation, I might have occasionally permitted my property to be controlled by a foreign commercial interest, granting their agents sufficient control that they can apply their decryption keys with assurance that I am not covertly copying media for which they hold copyright. I would not begrudge them their needless suspicions — if the convenience of enjoying the music or movie or whatever digital media on my electronic gizmo was great enough I might even have recommend it to others. But I would reserve the right, my property rights, to charge their agents rent. <!–break–>