My meeting with James Moore
I’ve talked to my MP twice: once briefly during his 2007 XMas Open
House, and then on July 23, 2008.
I discussed my objections to the bill, from a perspective of a parent
who needs to back up his kid’s dvds, someone who uses MythTV, and a
software engineer who is concerned about reverse engineering and
‘digital locks’.
Section #’s are from memory here:
I marked up a copy of the act with my notes, mostly regarding 29.21,
the rules about keeping one copy (which people can inadvertantly
violate with RAID, Apple’s Time Machine, drive caches, etc), and
destruction of copies after resale clause which would require physical
destruction of hard drives / flash media due to forensic recovery
software, 29.23, the restrictions on time-shifting, and the entire
section 41.
He is going to pass along my notes to someone in the Industry Committee.
He agreed with me that keeping one copy was not practical from a
computer architecture standpoint.
He agreed that the time shifting restrictions weren’t practial for a
PVR user that may catch up on their TV watching once a week. He also
admitted that he has some favourite episodes of The Hour that he
watches multiple times on his iPod.
So he understands things and is fairly computer literate, ie
understands the difference between RAM and hard drives.
We talked about what is going to happen to the bill when it is
discussed in the Industry Committee, and how the various parties can
voice their objections and bring in expert witnesses to explain
things.
My impression is that he is keeping the party line, said that there is
a need to bring the copyright legislation up to date. But he has been
known to vote against the party line for things that his constituents
want, ie the gay marriage ban.