I'm going to take a different tack now.
Google, my colleague said that you made $8 billion in last quarter. I looked it up. It's actually $8.5 billion in U.S. dollars, so congratulations. That's really good in Canadian dollars. You make it by selling advertisements, right? I like a certain music video or I like to read a certain journalist, so you show me that information and then you throw an ad up there and you make a lot of money on it. You make a tremendous amount of money.
That has worked very well for you. In fact, what has happened is that the journalist, the musician, photographer, writer, actor, the movie producer—all those people—make nothing. But that's okay. Even though that copyright is taken from them and they make nothing and you make all the money, that's okay. Why is it okay? As you well said, Mr. Kee, you're a platform not a publisher, and as long as you remain a platform, you have something called “safe harbour” which protects you.
What happens is that all of our artists, anybody who has anything copyrighted, a photojournalist.... It used to happen that they'd get an amazing picture, and they'd sell that picture and make a lot of money. Now you take that picture for free, but you didn't do anything. You show me the picture; you throw up an advertisement, and you make all the money. That's where all this content is coming from, and you don't pay for it and you don't want to.
The danger you have—why you don't want to do this—is that the minute you start controlling these ads, you move from being a platform to proof positive that you're a publisher. Once you're a publisher, you're subject to copyright and all that.
Is that not the real reason....? With this technical mumbo-jumbo you just fed me about how you can catch it instantaneously, stop it, but you can't get it on a database, is that not really that you're trying to protect this business model that allows you to make $8.5 billion U.S. in a quarter while all of these copyrighted people can't make a nickel? They've have been screaming to high hell that they can't make a nickel, and you're taking all that money. You just don't want to be a publisher, because once you're a publisher, you're no longer covered by safe harbour.
Isn't that the real reason?