p2pnet news view | P2P | Politics:- “While traditionally the United States has sought to dominate North American intellectual property schema, Canada in copyright matters has an important historical role as the place through which United States publishers were able to obtain Berne protections before March, 1989.  There is a robust exchange between Canadian and U.S. lawyers on the subject of copyright.  The big U.S. lobbyist groups maintain very active branches in Canada in the  hopes of influencing its legislation because Canada can move more quickly.”

The quote is from an American copyright lawyer on the news that the Canadian government has an online discussion site on the nationwide consultation on “copyright modernization through roundtables and `town halls`.”

The lawyer goes on »»»

They then use Canadian law as a wedge to obtain results both in the U.S. and in WIPO deliberations. In the past there have been some scandals involving the Canadian arms of U.S. based lobbying groups providing ‘assistance’ to Canadian legislators.

Copyright reform in Canada is a serious deal. Obviously, Canadians are the only ones invited to participate  – - but my brother is Canadian and maybe I can get him to think as I do.

Interesting that there are only two town halls held by the ministers; with Vancouver, a very large film production community, excluded.

Ottawa law Professor Michael Geist continues to lead the way in encouraging Canadians to make their thoughts heard, and in the current post on his SpeakOutOnCopyright.ca, he cites Captain Copyright, the, “ill-fated Access Copyright copyright “education initiative” that was withdrawn in 2007 following intense criticism,” going on »»»

Copyright education initiatives have remained a focus of some rights groups, who believe that convincing kids of the value of copyright can lead to greater respect for copyright law.  In fact, in my earlier writing on copyright policy laundering, I noted that a consistent theme has been calls for the government to create and fund public education and awareness programs.

It now appears that the government is laying the foundation to do just that. The Canadian Intellectual Property Office, which falls under Industry Minister Tony Clement’s mandate, has quietly launched a “Promoting Respect of Intellectual Property Rights” initiative that involves “exploring ways it can contribute more actively to promoting the respect of intellectual property rights.” According to documents obtained from a source recently consulted by CIPO, it is starting the initiative by conducting a gap analysis to identify existing IPR respect promotion programs, key messages, and how CIPO might partner with these efforts.  The scope is described as follows:

CIPO’s mission is to accelerate Canada’s economic development by fostering the use of intellectual property systems and the exploitation of intellectual property (IP) information. The IP rights delivered by the Office enable its owner to profit from the creative endeavour. However, inventors and innovators will only avail themselves of the IP system if this value is respected, i.e., the greater the IPR is respected, the greater the value.
The focus for our IPR promotion work, we believe, will be on awareness-raising and educational programs highlighting the benefits to owners, economic development and Canadians at large, more so than the narrower concept of IPR enforcement. We define respect of IPR as: Understanding what is IP, knowing of the existence of an IP right and affirmatively respecting that right.

‘I’m Tony Clement, Minister of Industry for Canada …’

Meanwhile, the government site now has a transcript of the Vancouver roundtable »»»

Notice: The text below is a literal transcript of the original audio recording (based on the language spoken by each participant) of the round table, keeping in mind the limitations of this process. This transcript was produced in an effort to provide quick access to the content discussion between participants.

Date/Date: July 20, 2009, 11:00 a.m.
Location/Endroit: Vancouver Public Library, Central Branch, Library Square Conference Centre, Suite 214, 300 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, BC
Principal(s)/Principaux:

Subject/Sujet: Minister of Industry Tony Clement and Minister of Canadian Heritage James Moore hold the first round table and official launch of public consultations on copyright.

Unidentified Male: So we’ll do that then. Colette, why don’t you go first then and we’ll go clockwise around the table and just take one minute and just say who you are and where you’re from.

Colette Downie: So Colette Downnie, Copyright Policy at Industry Canada.

Richard Brownsey: Richard Brownsey, President, British Columbia Film.

Paul Whitney: Paul Whitney, city librarian, Vancouver. Welcome to Vancouver Public Library, Ministers and I’m representing the Canadian Urban Library Council.

Danielle Parr: And I’m Danielle Parr, Software Association of Canada and I represent video game publishers and distributors in Canada.

Mira Sundara Rajan: Hi, I’m Mira Sundara Rajan. I’m the Canada Research Chair on Intellectual Property Law at the University of British Columbia.

Richard Rosenberg: Richard Rosenberg. I’m President of the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association and I’m on the board of the BC Civil Liberties Association.

Niina Mitter: I’m Niina Mitter (ph). I’m the Chair of the British Columbia Library Association Copyright Committee.

Elizabeth Rains: I’m Elizabeth Rains (ph). I’m the President of the British Columbia Association of Magazine Publishers.

Mary Henrickson: Mary Henrickson (ph), Arts and Culture Branch, Province of British Columbia.

Tanya Pete: Tanya Pete, Minister Moore’s Director of Policy.

Zoey Addington: Zoey Addington, Minister Clement’s Director of Policy.

Lisa Codd: Lisa Codd, Vice President of the British Columbia Museum’s Association.

Charles Lazer: I’m Charles Lazer. I’m on the National Council of the Writer’s Guild of Canada and we represent two thousand professional writers of film, television, radio and digital media.

Bill Henderson: Bill Henderson from the Songwriters Association of Canada.

Margot Patterson: Good morning. Margo Patterson, General Council with the Canadian Association of Broadcasters.

Stephen Ellis: Steven Ellis, Toronto based producer with Ellis Entertainment. Probably Canada’s oldest Indy, forty-five year old company but also here, representing the CFTPA of which I’m also a past chair.

Goef Glass: Hi, I’m Jeff Glass. I’m with Vancouver Fair Copyright affiliated with copyright organizations across the country and also a PhD student studying related issues and I’m a software developer.

Ian Boyko: Ian Boyko (ph) with the Canadian Federation of Students.

Barbara Motzney: Barbara Motzney (ph), Copyright Policy at the Department of Canadian Heritage. Just for your information, English is on channel one of the translation, French on channel two. And as the Minister said, we are recording this so when you’re making your remarks, if you could identify yourself and your organization as you’re making the remarks it’ll be easier for people to follow as they’re listening along later. Thank you.

Minister Tony Clement: Great, well thank you very much. I’m Tony Clement, Minister of Industry for Canada and I wanted to also welcome you here. Of course it’s my honour to be here with my colleague, James Moore as we start this consultation process. Over the next couple of months we’re going to be crisscrossing the country listening to groups perhaps similar to this or might be even divergent from this depending upon who shows up and the kind of geographic dispersion that we have. People have different views on this. What I’ve found to date is we have, there are different views but they’re always passionate. So I’m sure that this will be no exception to that. I don’t know whether it’s a harbinger but we’re starting this forty years from the date that a human being was first on the moon.

So based on that track record of innovation and creative content, we can get going here today. Obviously the purpose of this consultation is to help the government deal with modernization of our copyright laws. There’s no question that this has been a long time in coming. There have been a number of fitful starts and stops for reasons that are not in any one’s direct control. We have not been successful to date in updating and modernizing our copyright legislation. The fact of the matter is, we’re in the 21st century now and this is now, I believe, a matter of urgent necessity. And it impacts, it impacts individuals as consumers, it impacts artists, it impacts those who enable artists and consumers to meet. And of course, as someone who is sort of concerned about how Canada fits into the digital economy of tomorrow, I think that this is one of the essential building blocks, that we get this legislation right and that it reflects, you know, Canada’s values and interests.

Now we’re going to be, as I said, doing these consultations throughout the country. There’ll be, I’m sure, a surplus of opinions which his fine because we want to have this dialogue, we want to help through this dialogue, frame where we move from here and at the end of the day, in the fall, if all goes according to plan, we’ll be able to then present the results of this dialogue to our cabinet colleagues and ultimately through our efforts, through a bill in parliament. So I’m not going to prejudge by further framing the discussion other than to say, you know, we want your views, we want to take these views seriously and we’re looking forward to getting going. I think with that James, I’ll let you carry on.

Minister James Moore: Yeah, I just sent out a tweet, we’ve also launched a website just right now in real time, copyrightconsultation.ca. These are websites that are also available on there, people will have the opportunity to submit their papers. There’ll be also an opportunity for an online discussion forum within the website so if people want to put forward information and stir up a healthy online debate, there has been some, all kinds of online debate. We think that’s good. I think, you know, people often in politics, you always try and find consensus and that’s a healthy thing as well, you want to be able to move forward together. But I always think, you know, a good, vigorous, tough, honest, fair debate with people with good intentions coming together is actually I find, the best of politics and public policy as well.

As you know, we’re in the digital age, creative innovation and communications are very important everywhere in the world. Now in Canada, digital technology is very important to copyright, to creators, distributors and consumers. We’re copyrighting the materials and we want to build on these changes that are happening. This is a reform that’s been needed for some time. Bill C61 last year caused a lot of reaction, a great amount of debate in the media, online and throughout actually the course of the campaign as well. And the frequent comment that we’ve heard was one that average Canadians didn’t have the opportunity to contribute to the dialogue that’s important to this subject matter.

And so that’s why we are holding these nationwide consultations over the summer. Individuals and organizations across the country will be able to offer their views about the best, of how to best create a framework that will be beneficial for all Canadians. So this process will include the submission of papers, roundtables, town halls and we want to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to have their voices heard. Now of course, we have limited time today which is why I’m going to wrap up my comments very quickly here, but there is an opportunity for you all to be involved in this conversation, not just today at this roundtable, but also to make (inaudible) in the House of Commons. This is a real opportunity for us to have a full and engaged debate throughout the summer and then when we come back in the fall, as we anticipate the legislation which will then of course get through the formal process of actually enacting upgraded copyright legislations in this country.

And as I said just as a reminder, this is a closed door meeting, but it is being recorded and it will be available online. Transcripts of this meeting and what you say will be available online. The audio file of this meeting will be available online so your comments will be heard beyond this room. And with that, Richard, why don’t you take a few minutes. We have about ninety minutes or so and so just do the math around the table about how many folks are here. So if you want to make your comments concise, impactful, profound.

Minister Tony Clement: All of the above.

Minister James Moore: In the time frame that you have, but of course, we will be more than interested in having any written materials that you may have brought to read afterwards. Our policy staff are here, are departmental staff are here so we are really here to listen. So with that, Mr. Brownsing from BC Film, the floor is yours.

Richard Brownsey: With that introduction Minister, I think I should pass cause I think the only criteria that I can only achieve is succinct of the ones that you gave me. Film’s in an interesting position because it’s both the creator and a receiver of copyright. We use copyrighted material from other people and yet we also create, we create material that is copyrighted. So I think the industry generally speaking understands that there has to be rights on both sides of the creators and the consumers and they’re looking for balance. They want to be able to exploit their material long term but they also want to have people with fair access to it.

I think, so it’s that principal of balance.  It’s the principal of looking forward of copyright that anticipates where we may be going. We understand the challenges that you and previous government’s have had in trying to update copyright, incredibly complex. So looking and trying to find a piece of legislation that looks forward, it is very important. Trying to find a piece of legislation that is to the extent possible, technology neutral. So much of what we deal with references distribution platforms which are changing at a phenomenal pace. So the extent that it can be technology neutral, I think useful. But I think going into it with an understanding that you’re trying to achieve that balance and that you are trying to recognize that legislation has got to serve Canada as a competitive tool for a long time. So looking forward, a piece of legislation that looks forward I think is what you’re trying to achieve. So those are, succinctness if nothing else.

Paul Whitney: Paul Whitney representing the Canadian Urban Library Council. I would echo much of what Richard says. I think that what we need to do, first off Ministers, we commend you for engaging in this consultation process. We think it is important, and an important step to really start over and take a serious look at where things stand. We’re in the midst of a profound transformation underway in terms of how people access content, how creators create and the nature of successful digital business models and we need to make sure we’re going to do no harm as we go forward with this legislation.

Urban public libraries in this country circulate over one hundred and seventy-one million items to Canadian citizens every year. We’re also one of the most important markets for content creator industries. We purchase fifty-seven million dollars in books, seven million dollars annually in periodicals, fourteen million dollars in audio visual material and we’re spending eight million dollars a year in digital content and that number is growing exponentially as we move forward.

We had some serious concerns with bill C61 as it was tabled and we welcome the opportunity to work with the government to try and ensure that the legislation that comes forward this time perhaps does address some of those issues. We believe strongly that the circumvention of digital rights management for non infringing purposes should be permitted under the act. We feel it’s imperative although we recognize it’s difficult for the government, but it’s imperative that imposed contracts should not override the rights that citizens have under the law. We have great concerns about protecting the public domain. This building houses over three hundred thousand historical photographs for example, relating to British Columbia. Changes in how photographs are handled under the law is a very significant issue for us.

Canada has what has been described as a gold standard with respect to copyright law and print disabilities and how the print disable can access content. Having said that, there are necessary improvements that need to be addressed and there are significant issues that arise in the digital context. Library exceptions should be carried forward into the digital environment. We should be permitted to continue to preserve our intellectual heritage. Strengthening fair dealing again is a challenge but I think it’s something that we need to consider carefully and look at how we balance things. This library may in and of itself, be an internet service provider and we are concerned about some of the potential implications of ISP legislation, both in the copyright act and other federal legislation and that would have on education institutions and libraries.

We are really encouraged by the role that libraries are increasingly playing in disseminating digital content to our users. The Canadian Research Knowledge Network signed an eleven million dollar purchase agreement to purchase Canadian social science and humanities monographs in digital form. We have charted really, a groundbreaking experiment with the Association of British Columbia Book Publishers to make BC published books available online through all types of libraries in this province. We’re demonstrating that libraries have a role to play, that we are a significant generator of revenue and income for the creator community and we’re committed to work towards a fair and equitable solutions to some of the challenges that are facing us. Things like Google Print are a major concern right now and what that’s going to mean for Canada’s ability to compete.

Does this mean that all of a sudden we’re going to have situations where users of the United American libraries are going to have access to the world’s print heritage and Canadian libraries don’t. And in fact, Canadian content will be on Google Print. These are very significant challenges and not necessarily all within the power of the government to resolve but I think we need to have an informed dialogue. We totally respect content creators and the creators, the providers denounce piracy and counterfeiting. This is not an issue for us but together we’re hoping we can find a balanced approach. Thank you.

Danielle Parr: Great, thank you very much. Danielle Parr with the Entertainment Software Association of Canada. So again, thank you very much for hosting the consultations. We’re very pleased to be at the table and certainly Minister, took note of your comments this morning. I was at the digital forum and I know a lot of the comments made there was what about content, we need to deal with content so I was encouraged to hear your comments this morning that this is an important part of the overall digital strategy.

So we would agree, I mean we’re here in Vancouver, we are the largest, the largest hub for video game development in Canada. Canada in fact is the third largest producer of video games in the world. We are hitting well above our weight class, we’re extremely successful and we are, you know, right behind Japan and the US. And if you look at that on a proportional basis with our population, it’s especially impressive. You know, in Canada, sales of entertainment software last year and hardware, two point two billion dollars. It was a record breaking year and we’re continuing to see growth. So, and I say that because our industry has huge potential for the Canadian economy. And I think it’s important to think about that when you’re crafting policy to protect intellectual property.

Now you might also say, I know we’ve heard this argument, well you’re doing so well, why should we worry about you.  But if you look at our online piracy statistics, between 2007 and 2008, we saw three hundred percent increase in online piracy. You know, video games are, we haven’t been affected as quickly perhaps as music and movies have, in part because of our file size, they’re massive. And so as broadband speed catches up, it becomes easier and easier to download games online. So we really have to take action now to prevent, you know, further harm to our industry.

When it comes to bill C61, we’re actually really happy with the anti-circumvention provisions in bill C61. You know, certainly from our perspective, our business is the sale of intellectual property. We don’t sell concert t-shirts, we don’t, you know, that sort of thing. Our, we sell intellectual property and that is the backbone of our business and the only way that we’re successful. So certainly creating protection for digital locks is essential and we thought that C61 did a good job of that. On the other side, we felt that, the notice and notice regime in C61 didn’t go far enough from our perspective. We would like to see notice and takedown.

And the reason for that is, with sales of video games, you look at for example, Halo 2 for example when it was launched, the vast majority of the sales are in the first couple of weeks. It’s something like, eighty or ninety percent of the sales are right around the launch date. So when a game is made available online, sometimes even before it’s released, there is tremendous amount of harm that’s done in terms of sales to legitimate Canadian retailers and to the rights holders as well. And so that’s why we think notice and takedown is necessary because the time that you need to take to get an injunction, to have content, offending content removed for example, notice and notice doesn’t compel them to remove the content. We feel that a notice and takedown regime would be in the best interest of video game publishers in Canada.

The other thing, the other point I’d like to make is that Canada, when it comes to video games, piracy is disproportionate in terms of it’s offending. We did some research with gamers in both Canada and US and we asked them the same questions. We found that seventeen percent of US consumers or US gamers admitted to owning pirate product whereas thirty-four percent of Canadian gamers said the same. So it’s double the rate of piracy in Canada. So you know, it’s time to act now. I mean certainly, circumvention devices and protecting TPM’s are essential. It’s allowing content owners to choose the business model that makes sense and ultimately the market will decide if you know, they don’t think that the TPM’s are fair or they don’t like the way the service is being provided, ultimately consumers will decide and the business model will be adapted. But we really do have to offer protection under the law for digital locks or TPM’s and allow consumers really to decide.

In terms of the video game example, I’ll sort of conclude, I know I’ve talked a lot, we’ve used TPMs in a number of ways. It’s not just preventing piracy but it’s also allowing more choice for consumers in the sense that, you know, services like steam for example that allow you to have a subscription essentially to a video game and you can log in when you’re travelling from this computer or you can log in from your home computer as opposed to only being able to access the game when it’s downloaded on your home PC for example. That’s facilitated by DRM. Same thing when it comes to parental controls.

So you know, if you want to restrict, not allow your kids to play M rated games for example. Or in World of Warcraft, you don’t want your kid to be able to play more than six hours a week. All of those things are facilitated through DRM. And finally also, time trials and VIP areas of sites and allowing people to try before they buy, all those kinds of things that are really beneficial to consumers. You know, I think the video game industry has done a really good job of using DRM in a positive way. Thank you.

Mira Sundara Rajan: I’m Mira Sundara Rajan, Canada Research Chair and Intellectual Property Law at the University of British Columbia. My expertise is actually copyright reform and I’ve had the privilege of advising a number of governments on this area already so I’m very pleased to be here. I guess I’m here in my capacity as a scholar of copyright, also a little bit as an advocate, an advocate both for the public interest and for authors. The story of how I got into copyright has to do with some family history. My great grandfather being the National Poet of India and his copyright situation being a very unusual one where we saw authorship and public interest concerns explored in an innovative way by the Government of India. So that tells you a little bit about where I’m coming from.

Somewhat in contrast to the comments that have been made so far, I’d like to make some general observations that I think might be useful. And basically I could do that perhaps by saying that I think there are two key words that really need to define Canada’s approach to copyright reform and those two words are clarity and balance, a word that has already been mentioned more than once. Clarity in the sense that Canadians need to know what their rights and obligations are when it comes to dealing with copyright works and digital media.

And in fact, that was one of the notable problems for me about the release of bill C61 that even spokespersons for the government who appeared on the media, didn’t appear to be clear about what the legislation said. On a number of occasions, statements were made and if you actually looked at the draft bill, what it said was something different than what government spokes people were saying on the air. So that’s the kind of situation that needs to be avoided. Obviously the government needs to be clear about what it’s doing but it needs to get that message across to the Canadian public as well so that we can understand what our rights and obligations are.

Second point about clarity, clarity not just in terms of the practical rights but also in terms of policy. So we need to know why our rights and obligations are what they are. And I think that’s really a key issue in maintaining the credibility of the copyright paradigm here in Canada and indeed, elsewhere in the world. Without a why that makes sense to the average person dealing with digital media, copyright law per say doesn’t make much sense anymore.

So three points that I’d like to make. The first thing that I can suggest as an expert in law reform is that the Canadian Copyright Act needs to be cleaned up and I don’t think that that will come as news to anyone. Rationalization is a key issue. The act has accumulated a lot of material over the years and a lot of it is hard to decipher even for a legal expert on copyright like myself. So clarification of the law, rationalization are very important. Things like putting provisions on similar issues in the same place in the act, you know, something so mundane, nevertheless well worth the attention of the legal drafters who are going to do this work.

Secondly of course we have to think about conformity with international obligations. In particular, Canada has signed onto the WIPO Internet Treaties which of course are the latest international regulations dealing with digital issues. But we haven’t yet implemented those pieces of international regulation in our domestic law. That’s a key issue that’s caused a great deal of international acrimony. So Canada needs to address that. May I say though that in doing so, the WIPO Internet Treaties do not provide formula that we need to adhere to in our legislative reforms.

So that’s a very important issue that the Canadian government needs to explore, what is the flexibility that’s inherited the implementation process. Key issue. And I guess a second component of that, what does that mean in terms of Canadian sovereignty in relation to copyright and cultural policy. Very important to explore that and come up with good answers to those questions, again to support the credibility and workability of the legislative solutions that you’re going to come up with.

Third point, going back to the idea of balance, what do we mean when we talk about balance. There’s been a lot of debate and discussion in Canada where the public interest comes up as an issue in balance. And yes, the protection of the public interest is something that should be a focus of the law reform. Again, that won’t come as a new point to anyone. But I will add something to that, we also need to be thinking, I think, about the rights of authors and artists, those who are actually providing the raw material for all of our technology to function.

So when we talk about balance, we also should be looking at what we need to do to protect the rights of authors and artists effectively in a digital environment. And when we think about that, we should also remember that there is a knowledge cycle and at some point or other, almost all of us find ourselves at different points on that cycle. At some point we become members of the consuming public, at other points we ourselves are creators and of course everything in between. So that should be kept in mind. I think that everyone has an interest in the protection of rights and creativity. That is not a special interest. That is part of the public interest of Canadians.

And final point on that, I hope the government will think seriously about the moral rights of authors and artists, an area that has been greatly neglected in copyright reform, not just in Canada but throughout the world. But it’s a haunting issue. What is the importance of attribution and integrity in a digital environment. I think this is really looking far ahead, twenty, fifty, a hundred years ahead, preserving the integrity of knowledge and information, preserving historical truth. These are going to be the key cultural issues of the 21st century. So hopefully the government will find time for that on it’s agenda.

Unidentified Male: (inaudible).

Mira Sundara Rajan: Yes, exactly. So for example, if we have a work that is transformed or converted into digital media and released on the internet, that work becomes subject to manipulation in an infinite variety of forms. And so we can have excerpts being taken out, we can have views being modified, we can have historical information being changed and digital media is so seamless that all of that can be done without even an awareness on our part that the original work has been altered. And of course, this can be a very creative process but when we’re talking about information where the integrity needs to be preserved, it can also be a dangerous process. So again, it goes back to the issue of balance, how do we find the right balance between protecting the moral rights adequately and allowing enough freedom for creativity to continue to develop on the basis of existing works. Tricky issues. Thank you, thank you very much.

Richard Rosenberg: I’m Richard Rosenberg and I’m the President of the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association as well as on the board of BC Civil Liberties. And for my other professional requirements, I’m a professor of merits in the Department of Computer Science at UBC, but I’m not going to talk technically. There are a number of issues that I and the organizations I represent are concerned about. By the very name of the organizations, privacy is one. And one of the concerns we had in general about the way current copyright law is being directed is the responsibility to put on ISP’s to manage appropriately and to be available to respond to concerns of various organizations, companies and so on that are concerned about violations in privacy and loss of revenue.

The concern we have is that ISP’s will have some responsibility beyond what we want them to have. And I think we don’t want them to have an investigatory responsibility, we don’t them violating the privacy of their customers. If you look back to the US legislation, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that limited the responsibilities of ISP’s. And although I’m not a fan of that act, in this regard I think it was useful. So we’re concerned with this and we hope that whatever follows, whatever comes out of the legislation does respect the ISP’s work responsibility and the privacy of it’s customers.

We also are pleased that in fact you’re holding hearings on this given that bill C61 appeared with hardly any hearings involved. The government presented it and it was highly criticized that it hadn’t tapped current opinion. So this is a point in favour of consultations, even though we just found out about it two or three days before our appearance, so things are a little rushed. I thought I’d mention that so no one else has to express their concern.

There are other areas of the privacy beyond the legislation that’s coming in that impacts on the usefulness of the act. Things like ACTA. Canada is involved in the Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement and this is a rather secret operation contrary to what I’ve just argued that it should be open and more public input. So this is an area that Canada and the States and many other countries have been meeting on to construct this new trade agreement in intellectual property and so on and I think we have to be very careful in things done in secret. I mean it just, it doesn’t have the proper input to develop legislation which will meet the purposes of that legislation. So we should be careful in that regard.

I also want to mention something which has been brought to my attention by lawyers in our organization and a given when organizations, which is freedom of information. We’re concerned that Canada continues to rely on crown copyright and we would hope that this would be looked at carefully so in fact as in the US and many other countries, the government once having produced something, it’s out there, it’s open. You don’t have to get any further agreement or work out some deal on how you can use it or not use it. It’s not a big, why doesn’t the government just give up crown copyright? What’s the big deal?

I mean if our model in a sense is the US, it doesn’t have it. Once documents have been produced, they’re out there. They’re distributed on the net, people have access. We should follow suit in that regard. And again I have to emphasize that I’m not saying this because I think the States is a great model in all it’s activities. In this regard I think it is, in many others, not. And this of course deals to the, what’s happening to the traditional use of Canada fair dealing in the States, fair use.

As an author, I’ve spent a lot of time in the past sending off to companies, can I use these two sentences, can I use these three sentences. Cause no one ever told me, well you can use three sentences, that’s okay, but you can’t use four or you can’t use ten. How much can I use? Well you can’t use more than X percent of the article. And given the ease of which things can be used and I’m not concerned about people making changes or adjusting them, that’s a separate issue. But just the fact that you can use them, that should be made much easier than it is now, and without, and the restrictions should be limited. The argument that that will decrease the income to authors if you quote too much, well the general case is, you don’t quote too much, you quote a little bit and that may increase the interest in the author. Someone may say, oh what else did that person say? What other things might be of interest?

Okay, and just to point out that I think that there’s some directions that are not good is the last point I want to make, is the activities over the years of the Recording Industry Association of the US in its pursuit of people who make copies of songs and movies. And that, that varied from endless pursuits at universities to now, this last case where a woman has been fined a million and a half dollars for making copies. Now I know you want to protect authors, protect recording, all of this, surely not much is achieved by taking a woman to court and forcing to pay a million and a half dollars and that I think is something to be avoided. Making people aware of the importance of copyright for a healthy climate of producing art, science, etc. is the way to go and the fining and searching and forcing ISP’s to report large downloads of music, that’s not the way to go. Thank you.

Niina Mitter: I’m Niina Mitter and here as Chair of the British Columbia Library Association’s Copyright Committee. But I’m here also first and foremost as a librarian. Libraries and librarians speak on behalf of all users. Millions of students, educators, scholars, researchers, lifelong learners, the perceptually disabled, business people, special library users and recreational readers from children to senior citizens. BCLA represents the interests of hundreds of thousands of such users served by library staff in some two hundred and seventy public and academic libraries in rural and urban communities around the province.

Annually, BC academic and public libraries spend more than seventy-two million dollars just on buying content and I’m not including licensing. Our libraries are thus a major and consistent market for content producers of all sorts, from book and magazine publishers to documentary film producers, to software developers and journal aggregators. BCLA is also affiliated with the Canadian Library Association representing thousands of libraries across Canada on a range of public policy issues.

At this time in our opinion, no public policy issue is more critical than copyright because libraries currently provide unfettered access to content in support of such important policy goals as encouraging and supporting creativity and innovation in our growing knowledge economy and furthering the development of research and education through the use of digital technologies. This is a tremendous opportunity here to craft copyright legislation that will not only strike that necessary balance between the rights of copyright holders and of users of copyrighted materials, but will also further the important societal and economic goals of greater creativity, innovation, advances in research and development and the increased productivity that is so critical for a competitive edge in the harsh economic climate we all face today.

It’s important therefore to pay close attention to some of the important issues that have arisen during previous attempts to craft copyright legislation. I’m just going to focus on a few that the BC Library Association has considered important. The first of course is digital rights management and technological protection measures. We feel that any move to include a blanket prohibition on the circumvention of DRM and TPM technology must be resisted. Not only does it deny users the right to circumvent TPM’s for perfectly legitimate reasons such as those covered by fair dealing and copying content for rich copyright has expired, but it also criminalizes Canadians who seek to do only what is their right. Options to make it illegal to circumvent TPM for the purposes of copyright infringement do exist in other jurisdictions such as Denmark and are much to be preferred.

A second issue is that of contract law overriding legislation. We feel it would be unacceptable and indeed unwise for any new legislation to enshrine the principal that contracts override fair dealing and other user rights already grounded under the existing copyright act. Such a move would constitute failure to protect individual users and institutions from imposed contractual terms which override their legislative rights and would undermine the public interest and negate the purpose of copyright legislation. It would diminish the power of legislation and weaken parliament.

The third area we are concerned about is perceptual disabilities. Currently, less than five percent of the works protected by copyright are estimated to be accessible by people with perceptual disabilities. Any amendments to the copyright legislation must include provisions to broaden that access, including allowing TPM’s and DRM’s to be removed for the purpose of producing materials in alternate formats. With constantly changing technology, it is also critical that language should be format neutral to enable new formats to be seamlessly introduced and for all formats to be loanable across international borders.

Unidentified Male: (inaudible).

Niina Mitter: Then there is the issue of statutory damages. Those users who act with good faith in the belief that their actions with respect to a work are within fair dealing or are protected by some other user right, should not be subject to statutory damages at all, similar to the provisions in section 504 of US copyright law. This protection should apply to individuals as well as libraries and educational institutions and their employees. Then there is the exceptions, the library exceptions for research and private study and this I think is one of our critical concerns.

Minister Tony Clement: (inaudible) that they were in some way in violation of the statutory provisions then? They’d have a warning and say you’re now, you’re by warned that if you do this again, you would be subject to a fine?

Niina Mitter: Well there should be some, there should be some, at present of course with statutory damages, there’s no requirement to prove that there has been any harm for instance.

Minister Tony Clement: Right, so you’re saying that you would require that, that there’d have to be harm to be proved.

Niina Mitter: Yes.

Minister Tony Clement: Okay, I’m just unpacking it a little bit here but thank you.

Niina Mitter: The CCH versus law society of Upper Canada case gives library staff the right to provide print and electronic copies of materials to their users for private research and study. In keeping with the principals set out in this decision, the library archive and museum exceptions for research and private study should be broadened to provide these institutions with the ability to do anything for their patrons or the patrons of other institutions that those people may do for themselves under the act as fair dealing. As a case in point, restrictions on the electronic delivery of inter-library loans should be avoided as contravening a major supreme court ruling, ignoring the reality of research and publication cycles and prohibiting efficient and environmentally sound research practices in this digital era.

On a slightly more personal note, I feel very strongly about these issues because I am a copyright librarian and I’m speaking to you today from the copyright trenches if you will. I deal with some aspect of copyright, print, audiovisual and digital on a daily basis. I have been privy to the distress of faculty members desperate to include what are standard works in their courses, but unable to do so because the Canadian copyright law prevents them or their students from having access to this material. I’ve watched students break down in tears because they had prepared classroom presentations only to discover that they could not legitimately show that crucial piece of video because the copyright law prevented it.

I have tried to assist utterly frustrated instructors, staff, students and many other users, try to find ways to use material without breaking the law. I have spent many hours trying in vein to obtain clearance for the use of material that should have been useable under any reasonable definition of fair dealing. On the ground, in the trenches, the situation is untenable. Urgent change is needed and I would just like to finish by saying that one of the most important things is to use whatever language in the new legislation, I stress that it must be format neutral because we are in the process of such enormous change, we cannot tie ourselves to our cave technology or our cave pedagogical methods. Thank you.

Elizabeth Rains: I’m Elizabeth Reigns, President of the British Columbia Association of Magazine Publishers. We represent ninety magazine publishers in British Columbia. Beyond that, there’s between one hundred and fifty and two hundred magazine publishers in this province and close to ten times that many in Canada. We’re a significant cultural industry and because of the product we produce, we’re on two sides of this issue. We produce content and we support our creators of content, but we also have content that needs to be protected. So I was really happy to hear the mention of clarity and balance because I believe that’s what we truly need in this situation.

Magazines want to protect our creators who gather news material under fair dealing which I feel is a key to democratic comment on our own culture in Canada and our understanding of our culture. We need as a country to be able to access the works that are created here in a fair manner and not to be worried and concerned. I had also heard about that lawsuit for one point five million with that woman, and there’s also a lawsuit in the United States against a young man, I believe he’s in his late teens or early twenties for several hundred thousand dollars for copyright infringement of music. So nobody wants frivolous lawsuits, no one wants a law that will just become a joke to people who are out there and as young people perhaps listening to music, doing what their friends are doing. We need some rationality in this and that is, has to do with balance.

Now as magazine publishers, magazine publishers are scrupulous. In general they’re scrupulous about their use of content, images, products created by copyright holders. We do employ freelance writers, we employ people that go out and seek images and other types of content and there are times, there are times that it has happened, there’s been some accidental violation of copyright. So there should be some sort of mechanism to give that warning or to bring some understanding forward. Perhaps for someone who’s new at this, doesn’t quite know what they’re doing and not get into serious lawsuits which would involve not only that creator that perhaps the magazine employ’s in good faith, but it would also tend to involve the magazine itself who was, felt that no copyright had been violated, who had to trust the people that they hired to do this work. So there’s that concern.

There’s also another concern in that magazines are increasingly going digital. We have in our association, we do have a number of, it’s a small proportion of our membership but we do have e-zines in our membership. Some of them are experimenting with digital forms. One magazine, a print magazine we have now as a member includes a DVD with their magazine and it contains videos, it contains music. So there is still a concern for this digital content and one of the big problems and from all I’ve heard, the reason, one of the main reasons people are taking this look at copyright is new forms have been developed to disseminate content.

So we do need those to be clearly defined but we also need to have some sort of flexibility and room in the future for new types of content creation that we can’t even dream of or think of now because they will come and we don’t want to open this up again and again because technology is changing and improving and there are new ideas coming up at an increasing rate all the time. We support the rights of libraries to disseminate our magazines for research and we support their use in education. We’re creating a product that is on the newsstands now. It contains topical information that’s happening today, but they linger in the future.

For example, in libraries and we do support peoples’ right to access our content and go back and use it, particularly in education which is very important to us as a society. But again, we do have our, we do have our content to be created, that we do create and we don’t want to see it misused. We don’t want to see it appearing elsewhere without our permission. So there does need to be a balance in this. It’s very, very important that both sides of the issue are addressed.

I also agree with the statement from the Freedom of Information Society that there should be no crown copyright. As far as I understand, we elect our government and in essence they’re our employees and certainly an employee would not have to, would not have a copyright that their boss could not use. So we should be certainly be able to use anything created by the Canadian government.

Minister Tony Clement: Can I just ask cause this is kind of a new thing for me. So what’s the issue about crown copyright, the crown retains copyright over its printed or its published materials, what problem does this create? I’m unsure of what the issue is.

Elizabeth Rains: Well there are times when research may be used for example to produce a magazine story. It’s not very common in magazines but I know book publishers may come up against this, using a substantive portion of a crown document.

Minister Tony Clement: And are we, we meaning the government, are we suing people as a result of this?

Elizabeth Rains: No, but I believe there’s obstacles. I’ve also been a freelance writer and I’ve been up against this and there’s a bit of difficulty, because you do have to request permission for these things and if it has to do with something currently that’s happening, you want to expedite the writing of that story. So it’s one obstacle that we don’t need in Canada because it shouldn’t be there, it doesn’t really make sense.

Minister Tony Clement: Okay, no thank you. I appreciate that.

Elizabeth Rains: And in essence, fairness, balance, being able to define exactly what we’re looking at but leaving some room and no making this a litigation free-for-all. And with that, the magazine publishers would be happy, so thank you.

Unidentified Female: Excuse me, just before we shift to the other side of the table, I’m just conscious of the time and I know that you want to have some discussion after. So if we could back to the, I know people have been impactful, not always as concise maybe as we could be, but if you could really try and manage your time as we’re going around. Thank you.

Minister Tony Clement: It’s my fault, I keep interrupting.

Unidentified Female: I wasn’t going to say that.

Lisa Codd: Thank you very much. Lisa Codd from the British Columbia Museums Association and so many of our issues are similar to the issues that are described by my colleagues in the libraries. So in the interest of brevity, if you, if I’d followed Nina, I would have just said ditto. So thank you very much for being so articulate about the importance of access for users and particularly preserving rights to private research and study. Those are very important issues for museums and archives that we represent.

For us a particular issue is photographs. I’m just going to take a minute, I think I can make it in a minute, a minute to talk a little bit about those issues in museums. Elizabeth spoke to what happens after their publications active life is over, you called it lingering. We are in the business of looking after the lingering information and keeping that historical information for Canadians. And we certainly appreciate the efforts of the Department of Canadian Heritage, the continuing efforts to help us do that, and especially to make that information available online. And making photographs available online is incredibly important for us and incredibly important for the people who we serve. So if there was one thing that I could leave today, it’s a concern around limiting access to photographs.

Under the current legislation I believe that after fifty years, copyright on a photograph expires. So that gives us a set time when the lingerers can be resurrected and put online and made available. If that were to change and to be placed like other products under the act with authors, so the copyright expired fifty years after the death of the author, we would be extremely limited in what we were able to provide access to for Canadians. So I hope we’re able to remain a, to continue a generous look at photographs and something that is clear. By the time museums got it, the path to who the photographer is in ninety percent of the cases is not known anymore and we would be very limited in what we’re able to do. Thank you.

Charles Lazer: I’m Charles Laser. I’m with the Writers Guild of Canada and we, we agree with and we support your two ministries, you know, call for copyright reform as part of a national, digital strategy. It’s long overdue and we’re glad that, you know, you’re tackling it. To hit the, to keep time short, I’ll just hit the beats. We would like the new act to encourage the widest possible consumer use of our material in any and all forms and we need to be fairly compensated for these uses. Those are the two issues that we think the new act has to balance, the needs of the consumer and the needs of the creator. And the new act shouldn’t criminalize common consumer behaviours while at the same time, maintaining restrictions on commercial infringement. As Professor Synderochon said, it needs to be clear.

I mean right now, and I don’t think any consumers understand that format shifting on television is a violation of copyright or time shifting, or storing a program on your PVR. All of that stuff, we believe needs to be made legal. And at the same time, we need to be paid for all the uses of our work. And there’s a program that exists in this country right now, there’s a private copying regime that allows for reasonable consumer copying and storage of audio material. You can record onto a CD. There is a CD levy, but this only covers music or sound. It doesn’t cover, you can record a song and give it to a friend, put it on a CD, but you can’t record the music video that goes with that song. That’s a violation. So we should bring all of these uses under the same kind of regime.

We think that we should, that the Government of Canada should ratify and implement the WIPO treaties that we’ve already said we would. And we also need to address, this act needs to address the issue of the authorship of the audiovisual work. Because the authors are the people who get paid for uses of that work. And the Writers Guild and the Directors Guild have, I believe submitted papers where we have agreed that writers and directors, credited writers and directors of the works are the authors of the work and we think the act should address that issue. That’s, you know, basically it. We favour a balanced approach. We’d like our works to be used by the public, by the consumers as widely as possible, in as many forms as possible and we need to be compensated for that.

Bill Henderson: Thank you. Bill Henderson, Songwriters Association of Canada. I’d just like to say that as a creator of musical works, we’ve been kind of waiting for about the last ten years for something to be done about file sharing and we’ve watched as various approaches have been tried in other countries, notably the US and seen that the approaches aren’t working. The notion of stopping file sharing is really, I don’t know who now believes that it can be done. Anyone who seriously looks at what’s going on cannot believe that it can be stopped because it’s just not possible. By the very nature of the internet, according to a study that we actually had done on the technical aspects of the internet, you’d have to rebuild the internet to change that.

So file sharing has become a reality for us and we don’t see it as a bad thing. Copyright, copyright is how we make a living. So copyright’s like very, very important. So I’m not being, this is not a frivolous thing that we’re saying here, but we believe that file sharing is actually a good thing. It’s a fantastic distribution network obviously. There are nearly ninety million tracks, individual tracks available on file sharing networks. There are about three to five million tracks available in what, you know, quote unquote legitimate downloading sources like iTunes and Pure Tracks, etc.

So you know, you’ve got five million that are legitimate and you’ve got eighty-five million that you can’t get on a legitimate network. Therefore, people file share. People file share because they love music and they want to hear it and they want to pass it around to their friends and we say fabulous. That’s great. That’s what we want. We’re creators and we want people to like what we do, we just want to get paid for it. So we think that file sharing, any attempt to stop file sharing should just be set aside because that’s, it’s just not going to happen and it’s a good thing so let’s make it work for us.

You know, there’s an incredible cultural history on all those shared folders, on all those computers around the world, amazing cultural history, the history of music. It’s phenomenal what you can get that record companies have forgotten where they put it. The users know where it is. They’ve got it and you can get it from them very, very easily. And this, sharing, file sharing is a behaviour. It’s not, there’s no technological spot where it stops. It is a behaviour and we support it, we think it’s great as long as people are not doing it for money. If they’re doing it because they love the music, they should be able to do that and we should get paid for it.

So because it’s a behavioural thing, we think technological neutral, a number of people mentioned this, we totally agree with that. We believe these people are not pirates. We believe if someone’s doing it to make a bunch of money and they don’t want to pay for it, they are pirates and we think they should be, they should be handled by the law, the law should stop them. And you know, but you’re going after very specific people then. There’s a huge number of people out there who are clearly and obviously doing it because they love music, for only that reason.

About DRM, I think it’s really important to separate TPM’s, the technical protection measures from rights information management, RIM. We have no use for technical protection measures and the only reason we feel that way is because consumers have no use for them. They’ve shown that technical protection measures will stop them from buying product that they otherwise would buy. They’ve also had terrible experiences with things that it’s done to their machinery and their gear and what have you. Technical protection measures, the circumvention of them should not be a crime, we don’t believe that that should be, I don’t know if crime is the right word, but illegal or infringement or any of those kinds of activities.

However, rights information management which, RIM’s which basically allows a creator to put the information about who the creator is, what the name of the work is, other matter, who publishes the work, things that are useful that could be embedded in digital files of music, of course, those are good things and we think that they should not, you should not be able to destroy them. We agree that they should stay in place. They’re important and they don’t stop anyone from enjoying the music so they should be left there.

I know we have to move quickly so, we do have, we’ve been working on this, we’ve been working on a file sharing proposal for the last two and a half years at the Songwriters Association and it is on our website, songwriters.ca and it’s available for anyone who wants to look at it. It is a proposal. There are many different ways to achieve the monetization of file sharing which is really what we’re talking about. There are many ways to achieve that. We put one forward to create debate which it certainly did and we would like to move forward with the help of the government to find ways to make this work. Thank you very much. Yes.

Unidentified Male: (inaudible).

Bill Henderson: We do. On our website there is a proposal and it actually involves, it involves licensing the end user, it involves the person paying, in the scheme that we set forward there, a person would pay a monthly amount for file sharing. They would, it would be something that they would have to decide whether they were going to do or not. They’d have to decide, it’s kind of an honour system that if they are going to file share, they pay this monthly amount. The monthly amount, I mean there’s many ways to do this. It could go through ISP’s, ISP’s could be partners in all of this. There are many advantages for ISP’s in monetizing file sharing, one of them being their whole bandwidth problem, if this were legal, they on their own servers could have all the popular files that are shared on their own servers so the pipes within their own system, would handle this incredible load which they now have problems with.

Instead of having to go out onto the network to get the files, they could find them closer to home so it could be good for ISP’s. This amount, whatever it could be, we feel it should be set by the copyright board which is an independent judicial tribunal, quasi, judicial tribunal as you know. And the beauty of the copyright board is that it gives everyone a fair shake at presenting their case. So you know, users can come to the board and say it should not be this amount of money, it should be that amount of money and the creators can have their say and the copyright board makes a decision. It works now for creators with SOCAN and other organizations so we support that. I think that’s probably the answer. Thank you very much.

Margot Patterson: Good morning. Margot Patterson with the Canadian Association of Broadcasters. I’d like to just start briefly by commending both of you on the hands on effort you’re making to hold these broad based consultations and also just to remark on the partnership on these important issues. It’s really, it’s appreciated so thank you for the information to participate. We really appreciate it. Minister Clement, last month at the Canada 3.0 Conference you said that worldwide, the digital media sector is expected to grow to two point two trillion US over the next five years. You also said that as the ICT sector evolves, the digital economy will become an even more integral part of our lives and with that, incredible opportunities are opening up for people with ideas and certainly broadcasters hope that they can be counted among that group and they are acting on that.

Minister Moore, last December at the IIC Conference you said consumers want it all, and broadcasters have to adapt in very difficult times. You’ve begun to do that by morphing into true media entities with the ability to cross purpose your content and distribute it across a variety of platforms. Broadcasting in Canada as you may know, it’s a six billion dollar industry serving industries, excuse me, communities across the country. Broadcasters are adapting and morphing as you say and in difficult times right now that see a television stations changing hands for a dollar and significant losses in sales and share value. Broadcasters want to stay relevant and continue to have the opportunity to participate in the digital economy.

I’d like to spend just a moment on setting the scene in terms of broadcasters specific perspective on copyright. Broadcasters we think have a unique perspective. We’re both owners and users of copyright protected materials and to that end, we’re well placed to appreciate the need for balance in copyright. Copyright owners, broadcasters create copyright works both in radio and television. Everyday broadcasters, television and radio newsrooms and other studios create works and broadcasters as you know, also enjoy signal protection under the Copyright Act. As business users of copyright, broadcasters we think are in an excellent position to speak to copyright issues in the digital economy. And as creators of value within the system, broadcasters promote music every day and generate revenues on which copyright payments are made.

In a multi-platform world, TV and radio create the awareness of copyright works that establishes opportunities on digital platforms. Broadcasters are integral to Canada’s cultural sector and to copyright as marketplace framework policy and legislation and we feel that our positions have some relevance in the reform of the Copyright Act and the broader copyright regime including the collective administration of copyright. Just very briefly I’d like to touch on a couple of broadcasters concerns in a summary way. I realize that we will and we’ll certainly take the opportunity later on to go into more detail.

Minister Tony Clement: I will be meeting with Gary Mavara (ph) in Calgary.

Margot Patterson: Yeah, we understand that Gary’s going to be there tomorrow so I know that he may drill down a little bit. Just to flag for you then, the two concerns that broadcasters have. One is liability for incidental digital activities. I’d just like to say that broadcasters have evolved in step with other technology based industries in Canada and we require amendments to the Copyright Act to support broadcasters role as new media players in a digital economy. To that end, broadcasters are seeking an effective limitation on liability for digital music processing to support a lawful broadcast.

Also on the rights clearance side, Gary may or may not go into this tomorrow but I suspect he may touch on it. To start, I wanted to flag rights clearance issues and here we’re talking about contractual clearance issues as well as collective administration issues that flow directly from the Copyright Act. Broadcasters very much want to showcase content online and I want to start by mentioning a couple of instances where they have been hindered in that by copyright clearance hurtles.

One is right here at home we could say, a large western based broadcaster waited years before putting its signal on line, streaming its signal because it didn’t know the extent of liability, they didn’t know how much it was going to cost. The second example is a central Canada broadcaster who very much wanted to launch and did make some headway in pulling together a website that would have the precise goal of showcasing Canadian artists. And in both instances the, well excuse me, in this online instance, the initiative just failed because copyright clearance got in the way.

So basically what it comes down to is we’re looking for the government to consider the marketplace framework obviously of the, the implications of the provisions that it puts in place. Consideration needs to be given to how any new legislative provisions granting or amending rights are to be administered or cleared in the digital environment. Any amendments must include corresponding streamlining provisions. To what Merrill was saying earlier on, this is a question for rationalization. Making sure that things make sense and that play out in a way that make sense for future transactions. And we feel that no copyright framework is complete without a fair and effective structure to administrate copyright valuation and payments. And I’ll stop there and leave the rest for our more detailed comments. Thank you.

Steven Ellis:   Thank you. Steven Ellis for the Canadian Film and Television Production Association. This is a group that represents about four hundred small and medium sized businesses across the country that create audiovisual works. And I think it’s fair to say that it’s a group that is seeing its business model disrupted in a number of different ways by the arriving digital environment, but at the same time a group that wants to be on the cutting edge of those changes rather than the bleeding edge. And to some extent, I think we’ve been protected by and we have an opportunity to learn from the music industry’s experience because of the fact that download speeds and streaming capacity on the web has been slow enough that it hasn’t really enabled the consumer to hijack on quite as grand a scale as they’ve been able to do in the music sector, the creations of our members.

So it’s bought us a little time, even though the legislation has been slow as we all know to keep up and ironically WIPO in a way, if you look back, we say oh it’s been ten years but you know, those provisions came in at a time of blank cassettes and there was no such thing as pure file sharing. So I think what’s great about the opportunity right now and CFTPA is very pleased about both the way in which you’re now approaching copyright reform and the whole notion of a digital media strategy that the time has come, and it’s not just now about catching up to the WIPO standards, but it’s about setting the sales for what should hopefully be some bold new initiatives that can put Canada into the forefront.

Cause our members sure punch above their weight as Danielle was saying earlier, of the game producers. You know, we’re competing, we’re a five billion dollar industry in Canada, a hundred and thirty thousand direct and indirect full time equivalent jobs last year produced eight thousand hours of television, seventy-five feature films. But we are consumers of copyright as others have mentioned, you know, literary works, music, works performing, arts, visual arts, they all get hovered up into the creation of an audiovisual work for broadcast or theatrical exhibition or online exhibition.

And what’s interesting is that the Canadian Government and the independent producers have been partners now for over twenty-five years in a very, both a cultural sense but also a financial sense and you know, through measures such as Telephone Canada’s programs, the new Canada Media Fund, the various tax credit measures that exist, we’re joint investors in an enormous amount of Canadian content that’s entertained our people. And we want to see a return on that investment, we don’t want to see it taken away and I don’t think the Government of Canada wants to see it eroded either.

So we certainly agree that there’s a need for clarity and balance and in that regard, we think that that balance comes down to a simple principal. It’s the right to give versus the right to take. Even if you were to implement the most harsh copyright protected measures imaginable, it would not prevent an individual creator of a work from making their goods available for free. So when you look at the other way around, we’re feeling a little bit dragged into a world in which, because some people want to make things free, everyone has to make things free. So there’s obviously a happy medium there and that’s what, you know, we’re looking to help develop, a new business model that can work for our industry.

So in terms of specific measures, there’s one that isn’t often mentioned but is vital to our sector and you might put it down to the clean up of the act that I think Merrill was talking about and that would be clearly identifying who the first owner of a copyright work is. Because currently under the act, the patchwork quilt that it is, over a long period of time, doesn’t actually make it clear who the first owner of an audiovisual work is. So that’s a little ambiguity that could be cleaned up fairly easily.

We’re certainly generally in support of TPMs. Geo-fencing is important to us because of the fact that our existing model is dependent on licensing to specific geographic territories, in favour of notice and takedown, all the things that potentially can annoy some of the other players in the field. But I think there are reasonable courses to be set in these areas, for instance, in terms of ISP liability, we like what the UK and New Zealand are developing right now. France has gone a little far in the direction of three strikes and you’re out kind of thing. UK and New Zealand seem to be favouring some kind of oversight body to set policies over ISP’s and take a little more gradual approach to knocking down pure piracy.

We’re on the record with the recent CRTC proceedings on internet throttling which we’re largely against but in favour of increasing the capacity of the web so that our members can enjoy a closer relationship with the consumer which we haven’t been able to do historically. And we’re in favour of an ISP levy to the extent that ISP’s participate as broadcasters as they do to a certain degree in their activities. And of course our documentary film makers are very interested in the fair dealing provisions that work but at the same time, with a broad membership that includes fiction producers and other producers, we don’t want to see it to be, you know, to have the unintended consequence of being a gateway to free access to works that are controlled.

Obviously a considerable challenge there and I don’t know to what extent the government is coming at this with a clean slate, vis-à-vis bill C61 but there was certainly, we felt some very solid things in C61, some other things that we felt were, needed some work and will be on the written record in due course about all of that. Thank you.

Minister Tony Clement: Thanks Steve. We told you we’d get to you.

Goef Glass:  I see we’ll go a little over what we thought was the end but that’s . . . Hi, I’m Jeff Glass. I’m from Vancouver Fair Copyright. I’m also a professional software developer. I’ve developed free software and been paid for it. It’s in use in educational institutions around the world. And I’m a PhD student in communication studying online creativity and collaboration. Now I should tell you first what Fair Copyright is and what we aren’t. What we are not is a professional lobby organization. We don’t have a budget, we don’t have officers.

We’re simply an informal group or groups across the country with tens of thousands of Canadian citizens who are quite concerned with the direction that copyright may be taking. Now when I say ordinary citizens, I mean a wide range of people. We have entrepreneurs, we have software developers like myself, we have librarians, academics, and we have artists. And I remember at a meeting I had an artist in the front row who said look, my livelihood depends on copyright. I need it every day. But the reforms we’re looking at I think are actually bad for me as an artist. Another artist told me that he was concerned that some of the artists groups that represent artists present copyright as though there’s a consensus among artists, that we need stronger copyright. And he said in fact, I think it’s too strong already.

So why are we pushing in many cases, the proposals that were in bill C61 for example, for stronger copyright? The argument is that we need to stop infringement. But the evidence is, where this has been tried, like the United States which implemented many of these measures over a decade ago, that this doesn’t work, that this has failed and in fact, I believe the songwriter gentleman said the same thing. There’s only one way to stop infringement, I believe and that is if people respect the law. And I don’t just mean obey the law, they must believe that the law is fair. Actually, someone suggested to me a parallel with taxes. If you have taxes that are too extreme, you can get a lot of tax evasion. If you want a law that people will respect, a law that works, we need one that’s fair.

And today already, I think we have a problem because as copyright laws around the world, I know Canada’s hasn’t changed in about a decade, become stronger and broader, more and more legitimate activity is outlawed. Legitimate creativity. We have an explosion of remixes and artistic works and musicians making new music and ordinary people who are able to do that and they couldn’t do it before, and yet so much of it, perhaps the majority of the amateur videos on Utube might be illegal. I don’t actually know but I know a lot of them are. We have other legitimate activity like a parody, there’s no parody exemption in Canada. I don’t mean this as a big point but just an example, so that things like John Stewart’s Daily Show or the Colbear (ph) Report could actually be illegal if they were made here.

We also have the danger that copyright becomes so broad that it touches on things that have nothing to do with copying. I believe that Minister Clement has made some initiatives around automobile repair with DRM that’s been applied to automobiles in effect to prevent non official repair shops from fixing your car. Anything with digital technology in it could potentially be locked down with DRM to prevent all sorts of activities that have nothing to do with copyright infringement. And that’s why the measures in bill C61 were so dangerous, is the lock isn’t on the content, the lock is actually on the device that you own where it’s your cell phone or your computer or your car. So a copyright law that stops me from changing to a different cell phone provider, I don’t think it’s sensible. But actually the really big problem from the copyrights perspective is when people see that and they see that creativity is being outlawed, they lose respect for the law. And we’re a nation built on the rule of law so I don’t think that’s only bad for copyright and I think it really is bad for copyright in the long run, it’s also bad for law in general.

Now the situation today is actually such that the creativity and the freewheeling that led to Jazz in the United States decades ago would probably be illegal because that would actually be violating copyright law. Or Disney’s creation of the Mickey Mouse character if he was operating under today’s law in Canada, there would be no Mickey Mouse in all likelihood because that’s the state of the law. So I’m going to mention a number of specific areas but I think the big point I want to make is that in Canada we need something that’s fair and flexible so that the Disney’s of the 21st century can be Canadian.

Now I just had three points I wanted to make. We talked about ISP liability and I think it’s really important that we have due process for any measure we put in place. Because although the, Danielle Parr from the Entertainment Software Association mentioned that it’s critical for her industry the first few weeks of sale, we’ve seen that things like notice and takedown also have been used as censorship tools by people who did not even own the copyright on the material in question, and often cases that’s critical during a short period of time.

That actually happened I believe, yes it did, during the Presidential Campaign in the United States where John McCain had a video taken down with an accusation of copyright infringement. He reinstated it but two weeks in a campaign is a long time and I think that’s how long it took him, and he’s John McCain. You know, if it was me, I don’t know if I could get it reinstated at all. So we feel that if there’s a, and by the way, if I say we feel, I’m expressing what I feel the people I’ve talked to who are concerned about copyright.

As I say we have no official organization so I can’t claim to represent every one of them, but I think it’s very clear, one of the main things, the thing that triggered the tens of thousands of people protesting last year was the DRM restrictions that they were so broad. I think it’s absolutely necessary. We’re not legally or honour bound to ratify WIPO but if we do, I think we absolutely have to make sure that any anti-circumvention provision is targeted only at copyright infringement because there are a lot of other activities that are legitimate and valuable to Canada that would be outlawed.

And I think the, I’m trying to remember who said this, it might have been the gentleman from songwriters, we just have to be careful that activities that we see, that most Canadians see as normal and a valuable part of life, are not outlawed, just that simple. Thank you very much.

Ian Boyko: Okay thanks. So Ian Boyko from the Canadian Federation of Students and we definitely appreciate the invitation to be around the table today. We’ve been very active on copyright in the past. It’s something our members feel remarkably passionate about on campus, all the way from sort of the fine arts department, all the way over to hard core programmers in computer science. It’s actually an issue that cuts across most of campus. And so like many other people have said today who are membership based, our members are both users and creators and maybe more importantly, remixers when you think about creativity in the sense that, there’s no creation, artistic or intellectual that is original. Everything builds on, everything builds on past works. And so at all times, all creators have been users. And I think that’s a really important perspective to bring to drafting copyright legislation.

Now from the students’ perspective, we were less than inamorata actually with the educational exemptions for a couple of reasons. We were happy that education at large received a nod and was considered in the drafting process but it’s, we think it’s a bit of a flawed approach to think that the drafters of the legislation will possibly be able to predict how teaching and learning will evolve in the next decade. Like what methods will be introduced, what media will be introduced, what innovations will be introduced in the learning environment and try to craft exemptions and exceptions for every single thing that could possibly, like it’s impossible to do that job in our view and how we define learners and enrolment and lifelong learning and skills upgrade, and how that’s going to unfold in a digital media is very difficult.

And so it’s, from our perspective, our view is that a superior approach would be to take a long view to the way copyright law applies to educational institutions and even go as far as to say that a good, active and fair dealing clause renders educational exceptions irrelevant, I think it can be argued. And our view is also that the fair dealing should be actively included within the new draft in a way that is in keeping with the spirit of the unanimous, of the unanimous supreme court ruling of CCH versus the Law Society of Upper Canada. So I’ll, you know, I’m not, we weren’t going to make a detailed submission and we can get into the sort of nuts and bolts later and I’ll wrap up just by saying that, you know, that’s our perspective.

And I can also be brief because I think that our members would support me saying that our view is nicely summarized in a Canadian documentary and most people have probably already seen it, it’s called RIP, A Remix Manifesto. It’s a Canadian documentary out of Montreal. It’s won several awards all over the world and it really should be a required viewing for anybody who has a full time interest in copyright. And even I you don’t agree with everything that’s said in the movie, it really represent I think a fun and thoughtful, it’s the cutting edge of the copyright debate.

Unidentified Male: (inaudible).

Ian Boyko: It’s, well it’s, it’s called RIP, A Remix Manifesto by Brent Gaylor (ph). It’s received funding I think from the National Film Board. So, it’s really, it really is excellent and it’s good Canadian content when our members and our representatives saw it, we heard a lot of support for the ideas in the film. So I’ll just leave it there and open up the floor maybe to what comes next. Thanks.

Minister Tony Clement: Yeah, I guess we do have to wrap up folks. Thank you. This is Tony Clement, for our online listeners. Apparently we’ve got sixty-four people tweeting away right now on our twitter account which we just launched fifty-five minutes ago. So that’s always a good sign. I don’t think we’re up to Paris Hilton’s standards yet but we’re on the right track. Anyway, this has been, this is obviously our first attempt at this and as you can see, we’ve made some copious notes and our note takers have made notes, we’ve made notes, we’re taking this very, very seriously and from my perspective, as I anticipated, there, you know, we’re all polite, Canada is a polite society so I did have to read between the lines a little bit as to see there was some slight disagreements around the table.

But I think what you did was you touched on pretty well all the major issues that are confronting us as a society on this particular issue. So I want to thank you for that and you’ve given us a lot of grist for the mill. I expect that we’re going to get into the details as we continue our sort of cross country check up on this. I hope I don’t have to say that’s CBC copyrighted. Probably I’d have, Rex Murphy’s going to be on my, Rex is going to be on my tail now. But you know, we’re going to, we’re going to, we are going to drill down on this and we do want, if you’ve got written presentations or online posts or whatever you want to do to really delve into these issues, please do so but I think this is a great start. James, I hope you feel the same way.

Minister James Moore: Thank you all again. Copyrightconsultation.ca is the website.

Stay tuned.

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