I actually am familiar with the program because I subscribe to HBO. My wife keeps telling me to cancel the subscription, but I keep it anyway, because I love that program.
First, I have to emphasize that it's a very different issue from the other aspects of science and technology innovation that we've been talking about here today. So the problems facing HBO are very different from the problems facing an SME in computer engineering in Waterloo or innovation in extraction of bitumen from the oil sands or something like that. They are very different.
What I would urge the committee to do is not to conflate the moral and economic and policy reasons to address illegal downloading from BitTorrent with the IP strategy to deal with innovation in science and technology. Separate those issues.
There is one area where they overlap, though, and that is in the facilitation of legal alternatives. I believe that the key to facilitate market alternatives is to simplify and streamline licensing procedures.
I happen to teach a course on the digital music business. If you were an entrepreneur trying to establish a new legal site to sell downloads, you would find that the process is so complex because there are so many different rights holders to deal with. If we could work toward streamlining and simplifying that process.... I appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada in a case last December arguing that the court should do precisely that, and hopefully it will. That is the message: streamline.