Digital software locks just got weaker in Canada with the passage of a few laws that allow their bypass for repair and interoperability purposes.
Royal assent was granted last week to two repair rights bills that amend Canada’s Copyright Act to allow circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs) if done for the purpose of “maintaining or repairing a product, including any related diagnostics,” and “to make the program or any device in which it is embedded interoperable with any other computer program, device or component.”
The pair of bills not only allows device owners to fix their own stuff regardless of how a program is written to prevent such non-OEM measures, but said owners can also make their devices work with third-party components without manufacturer intervention. to do that.
Bills C-244 (Repairability) and C-294 (Interoperability) help significantly advance the right to repair in Canada and, as iFixit noted, are the first federal laws anywhere to regulate how TPMs limit the right to repair – but they are hardly definitive.
TPMs can take a variety of forms, from simple administrator passwords to encryption, registration keys, or even the need for a physical object such as a USB dongle to unlock access to copyrighted components of a device’s software. Most commercially manufactured devices with proprietary built-in software include some form of TPM, and neither C-244 nor C-294 imposes any restrictions on manufacturers’ use of such measures.
As iFixit notes, neither of these changes to the Copyright Act do anything to expand access to the tools needed to circumvent TPMs. That puts Canadians in a similar position to U.S. repair advocates, who in 2021 saw the U.S. Copyright Office loosen DMCA restrictions to allow limited repairs of some devices despite TPMs, but without providing access to the tools needed to do so were.
Such repairability conflicts were reflected in legal policy late last month, when the U.S. Copyright Office issued another round of DMCA allowances, including allowing fast-food chain McDonald’s to repair its own ice cream machines, which are famously always broken.
“While it is now legal to bypass the digital locks on these machines, the ruling does not allow us to share or distribute the tools needed to do so,” iFixit sustainability director Elizabeth Chamberlain said last month. “The ruling does not change the underlying statute making it illegal to share or sell tools that bypass software locks. This leaves most repair jobs inaccessible to the average person as technical barriers remain high.”
Anthony Rosborough, co-founder of the Canadian Repair Coalition, said last week that the new repairability and interoperability rules represent significant progress but, like similar changes in the U.S., don’t actually amount to much without the right to distribute tools.
“New rules are needed that require manufacturers and suppliers to ensure products and devices are designed with accessibility to repairs in mind,” Rosborough wrote in an op-ed last week. “Companies must be able to conduct their work without fear of infringement of various intellectual property rights.” ®
