With the introduction of Bill C-11 last week, the government plans to move swiftly to pass its copyright reform bill, including restrictive digital lock rules that have been roundly criticized by many consumer, education, and business groups from across the country. As the bill winds its way through the legislative process, I thought it would be useful to provide a daily reminder of what Canadians have told the government about the digital lock issue. Over the next few months, I plan a daily digital lock post that quotes from a submission to the Bill C-32 legislative committee or the 2009 national copyright consultation. The posts will begin with group submissions but I’ll feature individual submissions later in the series as well.

The series begins with the Provincial Resource Centre for the Visually Impaired (PRCVI) British Columbia, which works to assist blind and visually impaired students:

The exception that permits circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs) and the means to circumvent these measures for the purpose of producing alternate formats (Section 41.16(1)) may be largely nullified by the condition â€œto not unduly impair the technological protection measure.â€ According to the Canadian Library Association there is no effective technical way to remove the TPMs and to restore them after an alternate format has been created. The TPMs would in all likelihood, interfere with the use of some, if not all, of the adaptive technologies used by students with perceptual disabilities to access educational materials.