I'm Nancy Marrelli. I'm here today representing the Italian-Canadian Community Archives of Quebec. We're a small archive trying to make available the documentary heritage of the Italian Canadian community.
Archives, I want to remind you, are an important stakeholder in copyright. We're not one of the giants that we've been hearing a lot from today. We may be small, but we have a mighty mandate, and we have a lot invested in copyright, because we deal with it every day.
I want to talk a little about TPMs. In the 2012 amendments, the ability to circumvent TPMs was removed for all but a very small number of exceptions. It has created a problem within the archives community. We have the right within the copyright law to reformat materials that are either obsolescent or in danger of becoming obsolescent, but if they're under digital locks with TPMs we cannot unlock those digital locks, even to perform those legal purposes that are allowed in the Copyright Act. We believe it's very important to allow archives to be able to do things that are allowed under the Copyright Act concerning TPMs.
I also want to talk a bit about orphan works. Archives have a great number of orphan works. These are works that have unlocatable or unknown copyright owners. We have a lot of them within our institutions. We believe it's important to try to find viable solutions to making these materials available on our websites for part of the documentary heritage.
Thank you.