No, I think we will have a subsidiary role, but clearly the key role is with the Department of Heritage and the Department of Industry.
It's a fascinating issue. I was involved in copyright in various stages of my career. As you know, when we did the Canada-US. Free Trade Agreement I was actually the person who was in charge of drafting and implementing it, and that required amendments to the Copyright Act. So did NAFTA. So did the WTO. There were some very painful and difficult choices to make, because always, when you change something you have a direct impact on the rights between creators and users of the content.
But our copyright system is based really on national territory. You get your copyright in Canada and then you can apply for it in other.... Our whole intellectual property regime is based on that. When the Internet.... We certainly talk about a boundary-less world. How do you change those rights? What is an Internet right? How do you monitor all of this? There is an awful lot of more nominative work that has to be done, and I would imagine we will do some of it here in this committee and in this Parliament, but a lot of it will also start on the international basis. In the same way as we have international treaties for patents, for copyright, etc., we will deal with the whole issue of the Internet and its impact on intellectual rights.
Sooner or later, I think, on an international level, you will have to deal with the principles that apply to this new world, and then you will have national legislation in each country to enact it. It's going to be a long process, but it's fascinating--intellectually, just trying to focus on it. What is the issue, and then what are the solutions, and then how do you implement them?