This is the first in a series of many as to what is messed about C-61.

With most phones the price you see is a fraction of the wholesale price that the carriers get the phones for. Obviously the phone is not “free” or $50 to the carrier but it certainly isn’t the hundreds of dollars the carrier claims it’s worth retail.

The carrier makes up the money that they “lost” by subsidizing your phone over the plan of your contract hence they “lock” your phone so it can only be used on that carrier’s network.

But what if your contract is up. Surely the carrier has made up their cost to give you the phone and the phone is technically yours in the clear. Shouldn’t you be able to take that phone and take it to Europe where you can buy a SIM (Wikipedia) card and pay European rates instead of extremely expensive Canadian roaming ones?

Currently the carrier isn’t obligated to give you the code to unlock your phone to allow it to work with other carriers. Under C-61 it would be illegal to unlock your phone as that would be breaking encryption.

Two main options present themselves

1) Require the carriers to provide unlock codes for every non subsized phone with a simple phone call request.

2) Make it legal to unlock your own phone / make the tools legal to do it when you’re not under contract by adding some langage saying that all the provisions against unlocking don’t apply on unsubsized phones.

A combanation of both would be ideal as there really is no excuse for someone to have to force unlock something they own. Carriers should be required to provide the codes but if they won’t, it should be legal to unlock.

There is a major confusion in the media about C-61 and they don’t understand the core problem. The issue is not about people downloading music it’s about the anti-circumvention provisions which make it illegal to break the digital rights management (Britannica - Wikipedia) which prevents you from copying music and in some schemes requires your computer to “phone home” to an server from whoever you bought the music from before it will play.

Imagine if iTunes closed up shop suddenly. Most of the tunes you’ve paid for would suddenly become digital paperweights - with no server to verify that the content is legal it won’t play.

Providers have held consumers in the dark in the past. Google discontinued it’s video store leaving millions of videos they sold unable to be played (they did sort of offer partial refunds to people who bought their content.) Major League Baseball changed the format they sell videos in rendering all previously sold content useless. No refunds. Microsoft discontinued some of their phone home servers too so if you changed computers suddenly the music collection that you’ve paid good money for is also worthless.

C-61 would make it illegal to break the DRM on content that you’ve paid for but can no longer enjoy. Who is the real criminal here? It’s not Canadians.

The Canadian DMCA (ie C-61) also contains a provision that makes it illegal for security researchers to do their work.

The legislation would make all security tools illegal - if it’s capable of circumventing DRM it’s no longer allowed. You are only allowed to attempt to crack / find security flaws in a program or an encryption scheme with the creator’s permission.

Companies don’t like to be told that their products have issues that need to be fixed (if they don’t respond to the concerns it gives them a rather bad image) and wouldn’t likely give permission for companies to probe their software for flaws.

Are the bad guy going to respect the law and not exploit these exploits.

No.

Without people finding and getting these problems fixed we’re all less secure.

Just another reason why C-61 needs to be killed and and something that actually makes sense be written.

Today the much feared Canadian DMCA (err, “fair and balanced after consulting with Canadians” amendment to the Copyright Act) came out and it’s anything but fair and balanced.

You know when you go to buy an airline ticket and they show you a price of $199*. When you actually land at your destination the * has more than tripled your price after surcharges, surcharges and more surcharges.

This proposed legislation is more or less the same way. Yes, it does contain a provision according to Prentice’s mass email that “expressly allow you to record TV shows for later viewing; copy legally purchased music onto other devices, such as MP3 players or cell phones; make back-up copies of legally purchased books, newspapers, videocassettes and photographs onto devices you own;” but there is a huge *.

You can’t break DRM or digital locks (Britannica - Wikipedia). So, all a content provider has to do to strip you of your rights is put a digital lock on the content and you’re subject to a $20,000 fine for doing exactly what the earlier provision says you can do.

Another concept is cell phones. With GSM phones (like iPhone) my account is stored on a little removable card that goes into the phone. Rogers (my current carrier) locks the phone so it will only work with their SIM cards.

After my contract is up and I have paid for my phone I want to take it to Europe and buy a cheap SIM card there for use overseas and not pay the arm and a leg roaming charges Rogers wants. If I break the restriction on something I have paid for in full I am subject to the fine. Rogers isn’t forced to provide me with an unlock code at the end of my contract so under this proposed law I would be stuck.

I have no problem with bringing copyright law up to the digital age. I have a problem with false advertising. C-61 has been falsely advertised by Jim Prentice and it needs to stop.