The principal challenge we're finding with respect to the piracy and counterfeiting issues, which is in copyright and trademark, is that in terms of the trademark issues, there are still a lot of gaps that need to be filled. The Copyright Modernization Act went a long way toward addressing some of the challenges. We all had different perspectives on that bill. It included some things we wanted and some things we didn't want. It brought us a step forward in dealing with some of the main challenges. It was very important to us because of this issue of the technological protection measures and how important they are to our sector.
On the trademark side, there are still a lot of gaps. There are a lot of issues with respect to how the Trade-mark Act operates in terms of criminal provisions and anti-counterfeiting. There are things you can do in copyright that you can't do in trademark because of law enforcement, which has been a challenge for the industry.
The biggest challenge is the issue of actual enforcement and of devoting proper resources. We have some fairly robust provisions on the books with respect to issues of anti-counterfeiting. Even when you have someone who is clearly a bad actor, is clearly a criminal actor, who has fallen within those provisions, sometimes law enforcement doesn't necessarily pursue those cases, or if they do pursue those cases, and they've actually become much better in recent years at taking IP crime seriously, the prosecutors don't take it forward.
There's a real challenge with education in terms of the crown prosecutors. We don't have dedicated IP crime prosecutors in Canada, for example. They do have some in the United States. As a result, they don't take the cases forward. Even though you have people who have literally a warehouse full of counterfeit products, the crown slaps them with a $5,000 fine, pleads them out, and then they're gone and moving on to the next one. That doesn't necessarily act as a deterrent. This is a minimal cost of doing business. When people realize they can make as much money from counterfeit goods, especially drugs like counterfeit Viagra, for example, than they can from the actual drug trade, and they get a $5,000 fine as a consequence, you're going to find movement into that area, because there's a lot less risk.
It's really a matter of allocating our resources to address the problem, and frankly, educating internally within law enforcement, educating the crown, and making sure that we have key point people in the law enforcement community who are responding to these issues.