AskACanadian

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A place to ask Canadians questions and get answers. The most obvious questions would be about Canada, but you can ask about pretty much anything; news, current events, society, etc

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What are your thoughts on Canada's latest amendments to the Copyright Act? (self.askacanadian)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by Rentlar to c/askacanadian

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The federal government recently passed two bills into law, C-244 and C-294. These make it not a copyright violation to break or bypass a digital access control to software/hardware you ~~own~~ have legitimate access to, for the purposes of diagonstics/maintenance/repair, and interoperability respectively. Article from The Sarnia Observer

iFixit has applauded the move but says it still keeps bans on the sale and sharing of tools designed primarily for digital lock bypass.

What are your thoughts?

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[–] Rentlar 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

If you have to reverse engineer it to fix something that should be working that isn't or to get it to interface with another program, as far as I read it it should be allowed. If it's against their T&C they might be able to revoke the license or terminate the contract, but you wouldn't have contravened copyright under these new rules so it would be harder to pursue legal action against you.

Example if someone is trying to get a game they purchased to work on Linux, then they can break or bypass the TPM, DRM, or anti-tamper if it won't run on Linux because of it, or to debug or fix a crash. The most they could do in response is take away the thing you bought and go after you if you solicited tools to bypass the DRM. They also aren't obligated to make it easy to bypass.