If Left to Their Own Devices ... How DRM and Anti-Circumvention Laws Can be Used to Hack Privacy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter examines Canada's recently proposed anti-circumvention laws set out in Bill C-60. The proposed laws would protect the copyright industries from individuals using devices to circumvent the technological protection measures (TPMs) and digital rights management (DRM) systems meant to protect copyright. The author argues that the proposed anti-circumvention laws fail to address any aspects of the privacy implications of DRM, despite the obvious privacy threats that automation, cryptographic techniques, and other DRM technologies impose. The author's analysis begins by distinguishing between technological protection measures (TPMs) and digital rights managements (DRM) systems, a set of technologies that can identify content and set out licensing conditions. The author subsequently examines how these technologies are used to enforce corporate copyright policies and express copyright permissions imposed by a DRM through a registration process that requires purchasers to hand over personal information. Given DRM's extraordinary surveillance capabilities, the author argues that the Government of Canada has perilously failed to address any aspects of the privacy implications of DRM in drafting its anti-circumvention provisions. Such policy consideration are especially important in light of legislative reforms that use the law to further enable DRM and facilitate its implementation as a primary means of enforcing digital copyright. The author provides three public policy considerations in determining an appropriate balance for DRM and privacy: (i) the anonymity principle; (ii) individual access; and (iii) DRM licenses. The author concludes by giving three recommendations that would provide counter-measures necessary to offset the new powers and protections afforded to TPM and DRM if Canada's anti-circumvention laws are implemented as policy: (i) an express provision prohibiting the circumvention of privacy by TPM/DRM; (ii) an express provision stipulating that a DRM license is voidable when it violates privacy law; and (iii) an express provision permitting the circumvention of TPM/DRM for personal information protection purposes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".