Battleangel

Under our current model, Canadians spend billions of dollars on university research through granting programs in the sciences, social sciences, and health fields. Those results are typically made available to the public in one of two ways. If the results have commercial value, they are often brought to market, generating new revenues for the researchers and their institutions. Alternatively (or in addition), researchers publish the results in expensive scientific journals, which often fetch thousands of dollars in annual subscription fees.

In other words, Canada spends billions of tax dollars on research only to “buy back” that funded research through the marketplace or by subsidizing universities, which are effectively forced to repurchase their own research through journal subscriptions.

Canada must ensure that it does not erect any barriers to innovation by impeding the dissemination of research results. An emerging risk in that regard has arisen from potential copyright reform that would chill the dissemination of security-based research.

In the United States, the enactment of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has led directly to such a chill. For example, several years ago a Princeton researcher sought to release an important study on encryption. When he publicly disclosed his plans, he was served with a warning that he faced potential legal liability under the DMCA if he publicly disclosed his findings. Similarly, in 2001, a Russian software programmer was arrested and spent the summer in a California jail after highlighting encryption weaknesses in an Adobe software product at a public conference.

These cases sent a wave of fear through the security research community, leading foreign researchers to avoid traveling to the U.S. and Cyber-security Czar Richard Clarke to acknowledge that “a lot of people didn’t realize that [the DMCA] would have this potential chilling effect on vulnerability research.”

Canadian universities, colleges, and schools, which serve as a critical source of new innovation, must stop throwing away millions of dollars each year by paying unnecessary copy licenses to copyright collectives such as Access Copyright.