Evidence of meeting #38 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was governments.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Bloc
Ève-Mary Thaï Thi Lac Bloc Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC
Economic arguments are often put forward. For example, the cost of translating documents into both official languages is said to be astronomical.
Do you think that could be a hindrance to a more open government? I mean from an economic standpoint.
Vice-President, Newsgator Technologies
That is something different. I should have answered the question before, and drawn the distinction between open data and open government. Access to documents on parliamentary proceedings and the workings of government is one thing, but even if you make that information available to the public, a company cannot use it as a money-making opportunity.
In my view, it really has nothing to do with the documents, because they are just numbers. They are 1s and 0s that have been collected by the government for a hundred years. You do not have to translate GPS data.
We should distinguish between two aspects of open government. On one hand, there are the databases that can create an economic advantage, and on the other, there are all those other legal, problematic and political considerations. They either have to be translated or they do not. Those are all things that cost money, and my colleagues can speak to that. There are other problems, not just cost.
It is best to split them into two categories, so as not to impede the economic benefits, because it is not known whether the information will be translated or not, since a lot of data are not relevant.
Liberal
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
Thank you, Chair, and thank you, gentlemen, for being here today. My apologies for being late.
I'm sorry I missed your presentation, Mr. Macmillan, but I will look at it in the record, and I'm sorry to walk in in the middle of yours, Professor Geist.
I want to ask all of you this, just to follow up on something that Madam Thi Lac was asking about in terms of the official language question. Are any of you aware of a country that has more than one official language, that has a good open data or open government policy, and that is a good example we could look to?
We look to the U.S. and we look to Australia with one official language, but do you know of a country with more than one official language that has a good policy on this, a country that may have struggled with this issue?
Partner and National Industry Leader, Deloitte
I'm not aware of one off the top of my head, no.
Canada Research Chair, Internet and E-commerce Law, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
I would note that it would probably bear taking a closer look at how the European Union as a whole is addressing some of these issues. There have been some open data initiatives at the EU level, and the EU is obviously more than just bilingual. They're dealing with large numbers of languages all at once; there are translation requirements there as well, and they seem to manage to deal with some of those.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
Is there any conversation that you know of at the UN--you're making me think out loud--of this kind of policy? Do you know of similar kinds of issues they might have struggled with?
Canada Research Chair, Internet and E-commerce Law, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
What I've seen at some UN organizations is a gradual shift towards greater openness of documents that previously were either closed or fee-based. I think, for example, of the ITU, the International Telecommunication Union, the leading UN body dealing with telecom-related matters. Previously many of their documents came at a fairly significant expense, which, by and large, had the effect of excluding many from participating in some of those activities and left it to either governments or corporations involved in telecom issues that had the financial wherewithal to pay for it. There has been a gradual shift--and it's gradual--towards trying to make more material openly available by recognizing that cost for those sorts of government documents represented a significant barrier.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
Thank you.
Professor Geist, when you were discussing crown copyright and abandoning crown copyright, you talked about the failure to recover any monetary value because of the $7,000 in revenue and the $200,000 administration cost. You talked about abandoning it and moving completely away from a crown copyright system, although you did talk later about overlaying.
Are there various possibilities here? Is it either/or, or are there other possibilities? Are there any other models? Is there some other model of getting some value for taxpayers for the information that government holds?
Canada Research Chair, Internet and E-commerce Law, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
That's a good question, and it raises a number of issues.
The starting position of some countries--the United States is the best known for us--is that copyright doesn't attach to these documents, full stop. I think many of the examples we heard about unleashing the economic value--which I thought were terrific--originated in the United States, where they started from that position.
You see the origins of crown copyright in the Commonwealth countries, and we've seen two approaches there. One is to just abolish it altogether. As I mentioned, New Zealand is an example of a country moving in that direction. The other is to overlay the licence. It's not either/or; you could establish a licence and later decide to eliminate crown copyright.
The attractiveness at this stage of moving forward with a licence solution--and I think it's precisely why we've seen Australia and the U.K. move toward this--is that it doesn't require legislative change. We're simply dealing with a policy change in how government chooses to deal with its own documents. We retain copyright, but we establish a licence that will permit uses, reuses, and the like without the need to ask for prior permission. Perhaps just attribution would be required. The official document will still be the government's document, but we want to give publishers the opportunity to republish, in some instances, and add economic value, as we've heard about, and allow the public to use these various works without fear of receiving the kind of cease and desist letter I mentioned The Globe and Mail got in connection with the takedown notification when they dared to publish a chapter from the Auditor General's report.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
Is there a bureaucracy implied in making those kinds of decisions about how it can be used or what licence applies? There are varying degrees of creative commons licences, right? Is it going to take a new bureaucracy to administer those kinds of decisions?
Canada Research Chair, Internet and E-commerce Law, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
I don't think it's going to take a new bureaucracy; we just have make some choices. There are a number of different creative commons licences. A number of the countries that have looked at this issue have come to the conclusion that there is no creative commons licence ideally suited for government documents.
One of the chapters in the book is by my colleague Elizabeth Judge. She argues for a crown commons licence that would be specific for government. I think she makes quite a persuasive case that there's an opportunity for Canada to try to lead the way in creating a crown commons licence and to attract a certain marketability to the notion that this would be an open licence for government documents. We might see other governments follow suit.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
That's interesting. Thank you.
Mr. Macmillan, I read one of your articles after missing your presentation. In one of them in the Public Sector Digest, smarter government is one of the sections. You talked about how government policy needs to turn inward in how it prepares its data to be used in an open government setting.
Maybe you addressed that point in your opening statement, but could you talk more about it?
Partner and National Industry Leader, Deloitte
I didn't address that in my opening statement, but we did a section on what we called “smarter government”. What we meant by that was government's ability to analyze and understand their data sets, and what it might mean in understanding different policy options and outcomes.
There's a good example in British Columbia. They've created a pilot project in which they've pulled together data on individuals. They have a secure data lab where they look at the question of homelessness. They can look at health data, crime data, and information related to social services to get a better picture of what we know about homeless people and the conditions associated with homelessness.
That's an example of what we see as the opportunity for governments to get a better understanding of what we call “data analytics”. It is an opportunity for governments to leverage tools and capabilities that now exist within industry to have a better understanding of what information they really have and what insights they can get from it from their own decision-making perspective.
NDP
Bill Siksay NDP Burnaby—Douglas, BC
How do the analytics affect the open government argument, or do they? I imagine there's some benefit to understanding what you have and how it can be used.
Partner and National Industry Leader, Deloitte
We've put them together. In the paper we talked about three or four different topics. We included the smarter government one because of the recognition that this unlocking or unleashing of government for the public is also going to provide opportunities for governments themselves to get better at understanding the cross-implications of decisions they're making, which today are very difficult to get a handle on, given the way the data are stored and locked up within various programs.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Nepean—Carleton, ON
My question pertains to crown copyright. Thank you all for your testimony; I found it very informative.
Professor Geist, can you give a more precise description of the restrictions that crown copyright imposes at present? I think we'd all agree that government documents are widely used right now, and used without penalty or price.
Your prolific blog can quote government reports regularly. You can quote the Auditor General's report. Is the restriction on the reproduction of a full document with letterhead on it? Is that the restriction that worries you? What in particular causes concern about crown copyright on documents?
Canada Research Chair, Internet and E-commerce Law, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
Where I quote something on my blog or in an article, I'm often going to rely on an exception within the Copyright Act. Fair dealing would give me the right to use works, whether government documents or otherwise, for research purposes, criticism purposes, news reviews, or whatever it happens to be. There are five categories. Bill C-32 proposes to expand that in a number of directions. That's relying on an exception, though.
The rights that the government has with respect to its own information are the same rights that any other rights holder has, which are absolute rights. It can happen that the use of a government work falls within one of the exceptions. That's why you'll see sections of a report quoted in the newspaper. They have a news reporting exception that they can rely upon within fair dealing. They rely upon that with government documents in the same way that they'd rely upon it with anything else.
Once you move beyond that, as I said at the Bill C-32committee, it's fair dealing. It's not free dealing. It's not a matter of anything goes. When you go through a fair dealing analysis, you go through a full analysis about how much you're using, and the like. The same would be true for government documents. There are restrictions that someone might face in trying to use a government document.
Take a textbook that's a compilation of various materials. I had this for my Internet law text. We were looking to use a number of different reports from the government over time. Many publishers take a fairly conservative, risk-averse view, and we went to the government first for permission. That would be true for many publishers today.
Canada Research Chair, Internet and E-commerce Law, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
It was granted in that case, and, as I say, in most instances it is granted. There are two problems. One is with instances in which it's not granted, because it feels like a misuse of copyright. As well, from a cost and policy perspective, layering those costs onto Canadian publishers and authors, or onto government itself, with no real return, doesn't justify the expense.
December 9th, 2010 / 4:20 p.m.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Nepean—Carleton, ON
Fair enough. I understand where you're coming from.
What is the distinction, then, under the current crown copyright regime, between quoting a government document and reproducing it? Without expressing the argument one way or the other, just tell us where the line is now, as you understand it.
