Typically we have a client—sometimes it's even my esteemed colleague here—come to us and identify that they feel someone has misappropriated their technology. Then we actually do the physical forensic work to be able to link what they have protected in their intellectual property rights with the products that people are making.
A good example of where we see the TPMs and the Copyright Act and the nuance needed for IP is around gaming, for example. Obviously there's a growing gaming community in Canada. Someone could produce a gaming console and they could actually be the legitimate author and creator of the game itself, but the physical implementation of that, the hardware and some of the software that's actually used to implement and create that game, could actually be misappropriated by somebody else, actually knowingly. Perhaps that could include some of the algorithms for running the images, some of the hardware that is embodied into the console itself.
That would allow the particular author of that to actually hide behind the TPM, to say the TPM prevents you from looking at the underlying implementation of my game, and in violating the anti-circumvention provisions it might be questionable to use anything you find in allowing the original intellectual property holder of the underlying physical technology to enforce their rights. We feel that it could hinder the investigative process that would allow our clients to actually implement their IP rights.