I've got an editorial in today's Toronto Star about Sam Bulte, the Liberal Member of Parliament who advocated for extremist copyright policies after taking giant campaign contributions from the entertainment industry.
Under Bill C-60, a similar system would repeat the sins of the DMCA's notice-and-takedown regime, allowing rights holders to force search engines to remove cached versions of pages that they allege infringe on a copyright, but without ever showing evidence of infringement. These "self-help" measures characterize the thrust of copyright law these days, and they're an attractive tool. Self-help is little more than vigilantism: enforcement without intervention of the law or due process. Notably, the proposed Canadian rule does not have any penalties for rights holders who file false claims.
Another form of "self-help" is so-called Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. These are the technological restrictions put on the media that you buy, such as games, CDs and DVDs, that seek to control how you use works after you buy them.
These DRMs indiscriminately restrict the enjoyment of your lawful property, allowing rights holders to control your private use of media in ways not considered under copyright law. For example, Adobe's eBook technology blocks your ability to copy and paste a quotation, even where copyright law would allow it, e.g. in the course of criticism or in academic research.
A small correction: I wrote that "Canada imposes a levy on the retail purchase of media (blank tapes and discs) and devices (VCRs, DVD players, iPods) that compensates artists for the non-commercial copying of their works" but in fact the levy is only on media, not devices.
Link,
Link to Online Rights Canada's backgrounder and action-centre on Bulte,
