Limit Digital Rights Management
20 Apr 2022There is an urgent need to raise public awareness about Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. We believe the public needs to be protected from products that can be remotely turned off by the manufacturer, products that ‘phone home’ and would therefore stop working if the manufacturer went bankrupt, or products that are ‘region coded’. We will require that any product sold in Canada that includes a DRM mechanism is stored without DRM in escrow against a time where access to DRM versions is no longer possible.
DRM technology should not be protected by the force of Canadian law (such as the Digital Locks Provision). DRM measures should be allowed to succeed or fail as a business strategy on its own merits.
The following policies have been approved by the Political Council and will be sent to the membership to be voted on:
-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.