Thank you, Chair.
With these behemoths—Facebook and Google—two things have happened. You mentioned one, Mr. Kint, which is the profit. There's a phenomenal profit, but they get that profit by making use of copyright that does not belong to them. They take a music video they know I'll like, and they show it to me. They'll put an ad beside it, and they'll keep the money; the musician gets nothing. Or they'll take a wonderful photo that was captured by a photographer who could have sold it to newspapers and such before. They'll take it, digitize it, and then someone will look for that photo. The company takes it and profits.
They do it to journalists, to writers, musicians, artists—all types. I'm not searching for any content that Google's made. I'm not interested. Facebook doesn't make any content.
I want to talk about the money, the profit motive, first of all. They've been protected by something called “safe harbour”, which means they can say, “Hey, you wanted to see this. I just showed it to you. I'm clean here.” Here in Canada, for example, many of our media outlets are suffering tremendously. They've lost all their ad revenue as well. It doesn't mean that people aren't reading their newspaper articles. They are reading them, but they're reading them through a Google aggregate or something like that, and again, Google's taking the profit.
Do you see a way for Canada to deal with that? If not Canada alone, should we be working with our allies to say that's enough profiteering off of all these people? That's what's given this phenomenal power.