Industry committee  In response to your question, one of the things the Intellectual Property Institute is doing right now is working with the Federal Court to try to streamline some of the processes to make them more effective, to reduce the costs, and to allow people to enforce the patents, in par

Industry committee  I don't think it really is new. I think this has been going on since there's been copyright and since there have been trademarks. What is new is some of the technology, the digital technology, that allows people to reproduce vast numbers of products overnight. So a movie can be r

Industry committee  It certainly could work that way. In the area of regulated products, electrical, pharmaceuticals, there are violations of the law. Health Canada enforces other regulations. There are certainly avenues there. But what we're trying to focus on, from the perspective of the Intellec

Industry committee  They're not inconsistent, no.

Industry committee  Yes. We've mentioned already the penalties of $20,000. The reality is that when cases are brought to court, those penalties are never applied. Now, I agree that raising the penalties won't necessarily mean that those would be applied either, but I think it is a matter of percept

Industry committee  I think international agreements are important. When you look at China, I find it very interesting—A lot of our patent work now is work dealing with inventions that come from China. They are starting to become innovators. And now they're starting to get interested in enforcing

Industry committee  Yes, I agree as well, absolutely. I see the same problem with the two-tier approach, if you will, or trying to say that this type of counterfeiting is harmful and this counterfeiting is not. It's all harmful. And you're right that it's similar to robbing a bank and saying that i

Industry committee  I agree. The RCMP has a much better sense of who is involved in this. I disagree with Professor Geist to the extent that this is purely a health and safety matter and it's not a copyright or trademark law matter. It's both. In order to be effective in stopping it, we need to

Industry committee  I agree that border enforcement has to be there, and the Border Services Agency needs to have the power to seize. There has to be a mechanism in place to ensure that they really are seizing counterfeit goods and not legitimate goods, but that can be done. As far as other penalti

Industry committee  I would spend the money two ways. I would spend it on better border enforcement and I would also spend it on seizing and prosecuting the people who do it. For want of any better—

Industry committee  Sure. I would certainly focus on the health and safety, but I wouldn't ignore the rest.

Industry committee  I think the important thing is to start to draw those analogies. Right now it really isn't treated like a crime; it's really treated with a slap on the wrist or as somehow being okay. The important thing is to realize that it has a criminal element to it, and for the same reasons

Industry committee  I think one of the benefits of devoting more resources to this is in collecting the information Professor Geist says we need. I agree that more information would be good; I don't agree that we should just sit on our hands because we don't have absolutely definitive data. On the

Industry committee  I think everybody in the chain bears some responsibility. The retailer has to be responsible for knowing who they're buying stuff from and what they're buying. I think the distributors and importers have to be responsible for knowing. The manufacturers, if they're sourcing goods,

Industry committee  Certainly. From our perspective, a counterfeit is a product that intentionally deceives, that intentionally has trademarks and other markings of another product, that is a copy, an out-and-out copy. That's our definition of counterfeit. There are some grey areas. There are the