Thank you very much.
The Entertainment Software Association of Canada represents the Canadian video game industry. Something that some people don't know is that Canada is actually a global powerhouse in video game development. We're ranked third in the world in video game production. We directly employ over 16,000 people across the country in a wide variety of high-paying jobs. More importantly, we're actually still growing at a rate of 17% year over year. In fact, Eidos just announced that they're going to be adding 150 new employees to their roster over the next year. Given the fact that our average salaries are about two and a half times the Canadian average, it will amount to just shy of $10 million being added directly to the Quebec economy, which is great.
For our industry the e-commerce marketplace is critically important. We're in the process of transitioning from a packaged-good retail model into a digital distribution model, so the development of a robust marketplace is very important to us. There's a wide variety of issues that go into developing and maintaining a robust marketplace, but my previous statement listed three of them.
First and foremost from our perspective is updating and modernizing our copyright regime. Essentially, our products are copyrighted products; they need to be properly protected in the online marketplace. A properly updated and modern regime will include robust protection of technological protection measures, or digital locks, as they're sometimes referred to, primarily because they're used to protect products in the online marketplace and to support not just music CDs and DVDs, but also Netflix and the next generation of streaming platforms, Xbox LIVE, and those kinds of digital distribution platforms as well.
Other key points are, first, to make sure that we have widespread broadband penetration. Essentially, the e-commerce marketplace is not going to exist if everyone does not have access to it. That's a critical priority for all of us, I think. Also, similar to copyright, there's the broader range of legislation that will apply to the e-commerce marketplace, including things like anti-spam and e-commerce law, privacy, and so forth. We have to be very careful about these kinds of pieces of legislation when we're implementing them to make sure we're not having any unintended consequences that may adversely affect the development of the market.