For the age limit, 18 strikes me as reasonable, though for the purposes of this brief I haven't done an inquiry into when adult capacity should kick in.
In terms of the messaging, something really perverted has happened in the copyright space over the last decade. When disruptive technology hits a business model in the copyright space, usually one of two things happen. One, the communities, the businesses, evolve. They adapt to the new technologies and find a way to monetize it, find a way to put a business model over top of it, and gain revenue. But if that can't happen or doesn't happen, what usually happens is a legislative response, where we turn copyright from an exclusive right into a remunerative right.
That's why we have the radio system we have today. Radio started as pirate radio. When radio stations first emerged, they just played whatever they wanted to. Copyright owners went after them and said, “You're infringing our copyright.”
Interestingly, the legislative response was to say that we don't want copyright owners controlling radio, so we're going to turn the exclusive right into a remunerative right. Radio stations can play what they want to play, but they have to pay a fee that is fairly arrived at through a neutral process--something set by the Copyright Board, for example. That's the system that we have here today.
We haven't done that in peer-to-peer. We haven't seen, first, innovative responses in the marketplace to the emergence of file-sharing, the emergence of digital networks generally. We're starting to, but we haven't seen it yet, particularly not in Canada. Second, we've seen incredible resistance right from the get-go to any kind of collective licensing mechanism.
I mean, we like collective licensing in Canada. I like collective licensing. As a director of CIPPIC, I'm a supporter of collective licensing. But we haven't seen that approach. We haven't seen that approach mostly because certain stakeholders have been adamantly opposed to a collective approach.
Other stakeholders, such as the Songwriters Association of Canada, have been more open-minded about this in looking for mechanisms--through legislation, through the Copyright Board, or through private ordering--to put such a scheme in place. That, I think, is the best response to this phenomenon.