Thanks. My name is Jess Whyte. I'm a digital preservation librarian. I work in digital preservation and curation. I'm also a member of the Digital Curation Institute and the Software Preservation Network.
I'm here because I want to talk about technical protection measures, or TPMs. Specifically I want to ask for an explicit legal exception in section 41 for researchers and non-profit libraries, archives, and museums to circumvent TPM for the purposes of long-term preservation, research, and access. I believe that any digital content, whether it be research data, an author's drafts, scientific software code, or an e-book, which is ensconced in TPM or DRM is unpreservable. I would not accept anything restricted by TPM or DRM into a preservation platform because I would consider it to be simply inaccessible within a few years' time.
I have three cases I hope will illustrate how TPMs inhibit my work. The first is a collection from the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, from Canadian author James Bacque. He wrote fiction and non-fiction works. Within his collection there was a box of five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy discs, backups for a draft for one of his novels. It was written using proprietary backup software by a company called Corefast. In other words, it was ensconced in TPM, and so because we do not have an exclusive exception to circumvent that TPM, that content remains inaccessible to researchers.
Another example is from the Engineering and Computer Science Library. We're currently working to migrate materials from the 1980s and 1990s that are on older formats like three-an--a-half- and five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy discs. A lot of that is software code. While we can get that off, because that code is compiled and restricted by TPM, we have no way to make it human-readable. We have no way to preserve it in a format that is human-readable and usable by, say, a researcher who is studying the history of certain software in Canada, or a researcher who wants to reproduce scientific results using that same software and wants to actually look at the software and see the source code and what it is actually doing in order to reproduce those research results.
Another case I have concerns an award-winning paper, “The Enkindling Reciter: E-Books in the Bibliographical Imagination”, by Professor Alan Galey, at the University of Toronto. It highlights the barriers that technical protection measures put up for scholars. In this work, Dr. Galey sought to conduct a full bibliographic analysis of various states and editions of Canadian author Johanna Skibsrud's The Sentimentalists. However, as Dr. Galey points out in his work, DRM encryption means that when there is an attempt to read any of the HTML files—