Canada’s latest proposed DMCA Copyright Bill finally became available last night, and was brought to my attention while recording the latest episode of DyscultureD with Anthony Marco and Mike Vardy.

Because digital rights is such a hard sell to those who don’t immediately grasp it, let me show how C-32 would make me a criminal, three times over. Then you can decide for yourself if what I’m about to describe falls within reasonable use or not.

I. Suspect did willfully disrespect the region-locking of commercial DVDs.

It’s true. In the summer of 2008 I purchased two DVDs about a cat that blogs. They were region-locked for Japan and I got them to play here in Canada using illegal hardware that I got from a shady vendor known in hacker circles as “Wal-Mart“.

Even worse, I ripped and uploaded the intros from both DVDs for the purposes of scholarly review.

II. Suspect did willfully see what was not meant to be seen.

Yup, I downloaded and watched an excellent (if unfinished) documentary on hackers. And it was awesome.

It was funded by Kevin Spacey’s TriggerStreet Productions but shelved before release. The only other way I could have seen it was if I worked in the editing room on the film itself.

Under Bill C-32 my ISP could report me to the MPAA, where presumably I’d be extradited to serve ten years of hard labour as a production assistant on TMZ.

III. Suspect did willfully circumvent DRM to escape vendor lock-in.

Since Apple doesn’t make their popular fart app store/music player available for Linux proper, the only way I could get my hundreds of dollars of legally purchased iTunes tracks to play on my computer was to strip out the DRM. Actually they still won’t play because I can’t find a suitable decoder for Apple’s “Advanced Audio Coding“, but a lock is a lock and I broke it.

So there you have it, three counts of future-crime in direct violation of Bill C-32. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, what’s your verdict?