Welcome, Ministers.
I don't want to be brusque at the beginning. I was hoping we were going to have two hours. We only have an hour; as the lone New Democrat, I have seven minutes of questions, so I'm going to move you along quickly through the questions, because there are a number of issues.
The issue of copyright is a fairly straightforward concept. It's the right to copy and decide who gets to copy and who gets to be remunerated. My concern with Bill C-32 is that it seems to put copyright a little bit on its head.
Minister Moore, you're claiming that the public now has numerous new rights for making copies to back up, to time shift, to extract sections, all without any compensation to artists, yet these rights only exist if a technological protection measure is not interfering with them.
Now, in July I wrote to you asking to get a legal opinion from WIPO about whether or not the exemptions that would exist in the analog world can be applied to the digital realm and we would remain WIPO-consistent. I haven't seen that legal opinion, but since July, the United States court, for example, has ruled that even under the DMCA, the fair dealing provisions that exist within rights are not to be trumped by a digital lock.
We're now in a situation where Canadian citizens would face even more restrictive limits on rights that they're being guaranteed than under the notorious DMCA. So my question is, are you willing to amend the bill, which brings us into line with many of our WIPO-compliant partners, or is this going to be fixed in stone and we're going to have fewer rights than our U.S. neighbours, who are governed by the DMCA?