I have. This committee may know that Europe was quite an early mover on creating rules around exceptions to copyright to permit text and data mining. They had a tiered approach, where research institutions and cultural organizations could engage in text and data mining with copyright works without any liability risks for non-commercial research purposes. As a second tier, which is outside of that, there is an exception for text and data mining with the possibility of opt-outs by rights holders.
It was an early move and it was controversial. In a way, it suggested that rights holders can, unless an exception applies, prevent text and data mining by exercising the opt-out. The tricky part has been trying to work out how that opt-out can be exercised, by whom, the force and effect of that, and how it can be implemented.
It has created some challenges. Of course, that is still being worked out in the European context, although the rule itself has become the rule through the EU AI Act. The question that faces us is whether we want to follow suit or hold up and see how this unfolds and whether it's the best option. Of course, there are tensions and incompatibilities to consider with the other rules that are emerging in the U.S.
The thing I want to stress here is that copyright, while it might seem like a side issue, has been described as an issue that could bring AI to its knees. We're not just talking about movies, books and things that we think of as copyright works. Everything—all of the datasets and all of the data that's being scraped and used and on which these machines are trained—can be subject to the very low automatic protection of copyright.
If you create, at the kind of scale we're talking about, an obligation to license or a right to opt out of training, then you create huge obstacles to the capacity to access the data you need to train AI systems well. You create a system where there are limits in the datasets and where there are some key players that can access the data that's needed and there are others who cannot. It could become a true obstacle to the development of AI in Canada and beyond.