Law Times

Law timeS • SEPTEMBER 29, 2008 as young as 14 who commit ter- rible, violent crimes. At present in Canada, teens are P rime Minister Stephen Harper wants to put more bad teens in jail — those treated as adults at age 18. Kids are not adults and should not be treated as such, the Su- preme Court ruled on May 16 in R. v. D.B. Harper didn't like the ruling. Jailing 14-year-olds could be the ballot box question The Hill By Richard Cleroux Court rulings that he doesn't like is Harper going to ignore?" asks Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion. At present, youths get 10 years for first-degree murder. Usu- ally they serve six years, and then four more years under super- vision. (Second-degree murder gets them seven years.) Harper would put teen murder- ers in for life — which is 25 years. The sentences would be automatic. He says the Canadian public is on his side, but the "soft-on-crime" Liberals, New Democrats, and Bloc Québécois are not. He wants to make it an election issue. He wants the bad teens treated as adults and jailed in adult jails. That would rehabilitate them, he says. They would become aware of the seriousness of what they've done and come out better people. Harper also wants the news- papers to publish their names, not to shame them or smear them for the rest of their lives but to make them realize the seriousness of their crimes. Using the news media as part of a punishment process is new in Canada. There is no talk of a Harper taking out ads to ensure the names come out in print. In Great Britain, they put up posters of violent criminals on street corners to shame them. Some British gangs compete to see who can have more members up on public posters. Harper defines serious crimes That's why he is changing the law as soon as Parliament goes back into session. "How many more Supreme the Harper election strategy. Harper says he's reacting mostly to police and to "ordinary people" who are forming victims' rights groups, and not to crime experts in "ivory towers" who don't really know about crime. "You cannot rehabilitate some- body unless you drive home to them the seriousness of very vio- lent crimes," Harper says. Jail does that. Judges would also be allowed to permit news media to pub- lish the names of other offenders as young as 14 who have been convicted of lesser violent of- fences — those that carry a jail term of two years or more when committed by an adult. But, the Supreme Court ruling described automatic lifting of pu- blication bans on the identity of young offenders as a violation of principles of fundamental justice guaranteed in the Charter. The court cited the United Nations standard minimum rules for the administration of juvenile jus- tice, an international convention signed by Canada. Many journalists who cover the courts, often shocked by evi- dence, say they would dearly love to publish the names of young criminals. Court coverage in Can- ada in recent years has taken on a more personal flavour. Often news stories from the courts have been replaced by opinion columns that openly condemn the accused be- fore a ruling is handed down. Harper is making an exception COMMENT PAGE 7 was curious about trying out a much-anticipated, newly released game from leading game vendor Electronic Arts called Spore. I dropped into the local EB Games store to pick up a copy. Prior to making the pur- chase, I read through the packaging materials. Beside the content warning label, I noticed the following notice: "Online authentication and end user licence agreement required to play. To access on- line features, you must register online with the enclosed serial code. Only one registration available per game. EA terms and conditions and feature updates can be found at www. ea.com . . . EA may retire on- line features after 30 days no- ticed posted on www.ea.com." So, I assumed some sort hile I am not into playing com- puter games, I of registration was required to utilize certain online fea- tures and that there would be no other "hidden" restric- tions or conditions precedent regarding normal use. The installation process Spore and copyright reform W Bits and By Alan Gahtan to help prevent unauthorized use of the program. One of the things Secur- ROM does is scan the PC for the presence of certain other programs that it classifies as a potential risk and then refuse to load if it finds those. Un- fortunately, SecurROM does not tell the user the reason for refusing to load, it just gener- ates a non-descriptive error. Many users reported hours of wasted effort trying to figure out the problem. And EA's on- line FAQs regarding the digital rights management protection incorporated into Spore focus on the online authentication aspect, and omit any mention that it will purposely refuse to operate if certain other software is installed on the PC. Many of these "offending" as murder, manslaughter, and ag- gravated sexual assault. The Opposition had better go along or he calls another election. "We'll have the hammer of public opinion," he promises. There could be a court chal- lenge on the law, but by the time the court rules Harper would be long into his second term. The latest figures from Statistics Canada show youth crime rates in Canada have been going down, not going up, in recent years. The overall youth crime rate slipped two per cent in 2007. Harper prefers using 20-year- old stats for comparisons. Youth crime rates have doubled since 1987. Statistics Canada attributes it to an increase in common as- saults among young people. Harp- er does not point this out. He pre- fers to cite gory murder cases from the news media. His choices are truly ugly and frightening. The average age of Boomers has been going up in Canada. They watch a lot of television crime and are increasingly afraid of be- coming victims of youth crime. For many, it's a constant concern. Meeting that concern is part of for Quebec. It would be allowed to keep the minimum age for jail- ing teens at 16 instead of 14, in effect establishing different crim- inal code penalties in different provinces, a first for Canada. Quebec is important in Harper's electoral plans. He is not about to pick a fight with the Quebec government that is proud of its success in recent years fighting youth crime with- out automatic incarceration. Since adopting what it calls "a more progressive approach," Que- bec has been able to drive down the youth crime rate lower than in other parts of Canada. Quebec makes ex- tensive use of social workers, half- way houses, and outside custody instead of jails. Kids are treated as kids and adults as adults. But rehabilitating kids instead of jailing them takes away the nice, warm, secure feeling of knowing that bad kids are behind bars. Maybe a few years in jail would help the parents of these kids. But the parents are often not around when Harper sends their kids to jail. And that's why jailing 14-year- olds is a political issue and could be the ballot box question for a great many Canadians in this election. LT Richard Cleroux is a freelance re- porter and columnist on Parliament Hill. His e-mail address is richard- cleroux@rogers.com. www.lawtimesnews.com was uneventful. A serial num- ber had to be entered and veri- fied through an internet con- nection. Seemed reasonable to me that EA wanted to confirm that the software was not being passed around and installed on multiple computers. I later learned that this authentica- tion procedure was not only invoked upon installation, but could block operation of the program if a certain level of system changes took place. Use of the game by different users on the same PC (using their own personal windows profile) was also reported to cause potential problems. While the actual implementa- tion by EA of this authentica- tion process left something to be desired, I don't object to the methodology since it means users would not have to keep the disk in the drive when the game is started up as the means to validate its authenticity. Having successfully in- stalled the game, I was ready for some fun. But that was not to be. Any attempt to start up the program gener- ated an error in the security module. Back to searching on the internet. What I learned was that EA had also incor- porated a security program called SecurROM in order Bytes there will develop a work- around to disable SecuRom so that legitimate users of software programs such as Spore will be able to use the software they paid for as intended. Judging by the number of pirate copies that seem to be circulating on BitTorrent, or which are other- wise available on the internet, some probably already have. While I don't advocate copy- right infringement, I do think it is wrong for consumers who have provided valuable con- sideration to use a copyright work to be precluded from do- ing because of the overuse of copy protection mechanisms, particularly where fair notice is not provided to the consumer prior to purchase. Hopefully, the Canadian Hopefully, a hacker out programs are used for legiti- mate purposes. In my case, I suspect it may be a CD-ROM emulation program that is used to speed up another game title. Another issue is that the SecuRom program installs it- self, without warning, into the kernel of the operating system, giving it the highest possible level of access to the computer. A program running at this level has the greatest possibility of creating stability problems, and this level is normally restricted to antivirus and firewall type programs. I also learned that some users were complaining that SecuRom may not load if the system has more than one DVD writer installed, or that SecuRom could slow down certain Windows operations, in some cases even causing windows to write DVDs or CDs that are not readable. While I would still like to try out Spore, I was not prepared to invest hours of troubleshooting time on top of the $50 plus taxes paid to EB Games. Given the package was opened, I'm not going to bother trying to get a refund from the store. I've uninstalled the program and wrote off the money I paid. On a going- forward basis, I also plan to research future software pur- chases and avoid purchasing any titles that utilize problem- atic copy protection schemes. government will not pass Bill C-62 with prohibitions on the use of any tools which can (or even the communication of information that could be used to) bypass digital rights management systems, also re- ferred to as technical protec- tion measures. Any copyright reform legislation should retain the current balance of rights as between owners of copyright and those that purchase copies of their work. And, it should contain an exception for any use tools whose purpose is to permit a legitimate owners of a copy of a copyrighted work to remove or bypass a digital rights management system so that the work can be used for a legitimate purpose, including the exercise of a right otherwise available under the copyright act to an owner of a copy of a work, for example, fair dealing, modifications performed to permit interoperability, etc. Also, since remedies avail- able to consumers of low value software programs are typically very limited or non- existent, unless someone can be persuaded to initiate a class action on their behalf, hopefully the copyright re- form process, or provincial consumer legislation reform, will include an obligation of software vendors to pro- vide prominent notice of any shrink wrap software sold with these types of "protective devices." LT Alan Gahtan is a Toronto-based technology lawyer and Law Times columnist. His website is located at www.gahtan.com/ alan.

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