Industry committee  Sure. We're at the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa. We are a public interest technology clinic. How do we work?

Industry committee  Who funds us?

Industry committee  Tamir and I are lawyers, but students work at the clinic for credit in the summer, basically as interns.

Industry committee  Partially, but most of our funding comes from external sources, through our participation in administrative proceedings or court cases where we get costs or through foundations that fund the kind of work we do in technology settings.

Industry committee  What I like about the bill is that it says you can't do it by spamming. You go out and build business the old-fashioned way, or by using new technologies. You take advantage of those new technologies. You get your Facebook set. You build your website. You twitter what you're up to.

Industry committee  That competition amendment sounds reasonable.

Industry committee  I would to a certain extent reiterate the point made by Mr. Fraser that perhaps we're overemphasizing the difference between our views, in terms of how substantial a difference actually exists. My sense is that as soon as you start opening the door on “unwanted”, you get into difficulty, because if I'm an e-mail sender, how do I know what you want?

Industry committee  I want to respond to this. On something that we haven't heard a lot about or haven't heard come up, especially in the referral conversation, because I'm sensitive to that, my view is that there are other tools available to respond to referrals. When you get a referral, there's a customer out there who's giving you a referral.

Industry committee  One of the things I like about mail is that there is a barrier to sending it. There's a cost to sending it. What that does instantly is make sure that Nigerian scammers and businesses that are relying upon the economics of mass e-mail now have to--

Industry committee  If the unsolicited solicitation is worth making, then it's worth making on paper. It's worth making using mail. It's worth making using other traditional mechanisms of marketing. If the solicitation is so invaluable that the additional cost of going from hitting “send” to a million people to sending out flyers puts you off it, I'm not sure that the economy is hurt in a sufficient way, in a significant manner.

Industry committee  Yes, we feel the ducks got beaten and it will walk through fine.

Industry committee  It's an interesting debate. We're getting into paragraph 2(b) of constitutional law. I should highlight a change in our position, at least to a certain extent, around the appropriate scope of exceptions. In our submission to the committee clerk earlier this summer, we suggested that we should carve out an exception for political speech, charities, non-profits, and those kinds of things.

Industry committee  I can't speak to the specific practices of those individual companies, but I want to make sure we understand that this legislation applies to all companies, and even the good companies that we like and are customers of will do bad things from time to time.

Industry committee  I think that's a market effect. Windows operating system is the biggest operating system in the world, and if you're a spyware or a malware developer, you're going to target that operating system because you get more bang for your buck. Apple and Linux are smaller market share and are less attractive to malware coders.

Industry committee  Absolutely. This is something that I've heard come up a few times, particularly the international competitive situation--not the legal comparatives, but the international competitive situation--so I want to try to unwrap some of that. First, this bill does not outlaw electronic communications.