Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to come and speak this morning. Obviously intellectual property is a very important issue with our country in general, and is something we have some very strong experience in and opinions on.
As the chairman mentioned, I am CEO of UBM TechInsights, which is a company located here in the west end of the city. We have been here for the entire time of our almost 25-year history.
Our primary mandate is to protect intellectual property for creators and owners. We are like the CSI crime lab. We assist inventors and owners in intellectual property. We employ some very exotic and extensive reverse engineering forensic techniques to help people identify instances of infringement and to help them prove that to be able to enforce their intellectual property rights.
We are part of a growing cluster. Most of the world-renowned companies that help people protect intellectual property rights are located here in Ottawa as a result of the genesis of NRC, CRC, the defence research community, and some of the early commercial activities around Microsystems International. We have now grown a global and internationally renowned cluster of technology companies, with revenues probably exceeding $300 million a year and probably employing somewhere north of 300 people as well in the city.
We say we play a critical role in helping Canadian innovators and people on the global stage protect their intellectual property.
I'm sure the committee is aware that intellectual property takes many more forms than copyright itself. There's a variety of legal regimes for inventors to help them protect their intellectual property. Obviously Parliament is moving forward in modernizing the Copyright Act, but there are a number of other forms of intellectual property we feel are just as important in promoting and protecting Canadian innovators and owners. These include patents, trademarks, and integrated circuit topologies, to name but a few.
That's where we see the anomaly of how this has been proceeding. The protection of intellectual property relies on international laws and regimes, but technology is borderless. In many instances the rights of creators and innovators in Canada rely upon their access to international markets, and rely heavily on ensuring that the intellectual property rights of foreign intellectual property holders remain intact and sacrosanct here within Canada. Similarly, when foreign-based companies come to Canada and participate in our market, they believe they will receive the same comprehensive intellectual property protection here in our country as they do within their native regimes.
It's in that context that creators and innovators work hard to monitor and detect infringement of their intellectual property in the rapidly evolving and highly complex technology environment we see today. We have to look at intellectual property as intellectual assets. People have to be able to get a return on their investment in order to be able to refresh that cycle of innovation. That's where the protection of intellectual property becomes so important.
We applaud the government in all its activities in pushing forward on modernizing and improving intellectual property protection, but I would like to stress to the committee the importance of ensuring that these efforts do not unintentionally impede the ability to protect other forms of intellectual property. In this regard, we have a concern that aspects of the Copyright Act may actually have an unintended consequence with respect to our local technology community and our ability to help people in the protection of their intellectual property.
Specifically, our concern is that the anti-circumvention provisions could create legal uncertainty and could actually discourage the use of forensics to detect infringement of other forms of intellectual property, even though the circumvention of those protection measures actually has nothing to do with the copyright material under protection.
While the copyright legislation will soon be enacted, we will continue our pledge to continue to work with the government and the appropriate bodies to ensure that the regulatory language bringing the act into force is clear and precise so it does not hinder the full and forceful protection of Canadian intellectual property and the protection of intellectual property creators and owners in the international marketplace.
May I say we are very encouraged to date with the discussions we've had. We've had access to a number of people, some of whom are here today. We have every faith that these matters will be addressed proactively through the regulatory phase. However, this experience has underscored the importance and the complexity of the intellectual property regime.
Canada is a global leader in the protection and validation of intellectual property rights. The cluster of technology companies to do this through global companies resides within a 20-mile radius of where we sit here today. We recognize that Canada is the champion of international property rights for global creators and owners.
I'm confident that our role in the in the local cluster will continue to grow in importance and scope. It has been increasingly recognized—as I'm sure this committee does itself—that intellectual property is the engine of the new economy. Canada must do everything possible to ensure the full and complete protection of IP in all of its respective forms and manifestations, but also to respect how each intellectual property regime must be enabled to complement and not interfere with the protection and rights that are provided from other forms.
We are committed to working with the appropriate committee and the appropriate government and regulatory bodies to advance the cause of intellectual property protection. For our part, we'll continue to invest in improving and enabling our skills to make sure that Canada remains at the forefront of global leadership in intellectual property protection and innovation in its own right.
Thank you, committee.