Evidence of meeting #114 for Industry, Science and Technology in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was works.
5 p.m.
Conservative
Dane Lloyd Conservative Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB
For example, could an AI system moving through the Internet notice that an institution or an individual was possibly pirating millions of copies, or thousands of copies of pages, and basically flag that to a group like Access Copyright or to the government, for example?
5 p.m.
Lawyer, Norton Rose Fulbright Canada, As an Individual
If it exists in electronic form, it could find that. It might not even need to be AI, but could just be a simpler process. Often in image recognition, there's usually an AI component, so if it was crawling around looking for a similar image and I posted it initially, technology does exist that could find other versions or copies of that image out there.
5 p.m.
Conservative
Dane Lloyd Conservative Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB
Do you think that as part of the government's role, it would be necessary for us to include a recommendation or legislation to force giants such as Google and Facebook to rapidly take down copyright-infringed work on their search engines, or is that already happening?
5:05 p.m.
Lawyer, Norton Rose Fulbright Canada, As an Individual
It's difficult for me to say because I'm not exactly sure how that would implemented all the time and given that there's a jurisdictional issue that needs to be addressed. Before the Supreme Court, they already tried to issue an injunction against a technology company. That was a Canadian injunction, and then the U.S. courts had said no, that doesn't apply, so I think there are fundamental jurisdictional issues that need to be addressed, whether it's copyright or whatever other lawful act that's at issue. This was actually relating to copyright infringement of technology, so it is hard to enforce from a jurisdictional standpoint.
5:05 p.m.
Lawyer, Norton Rose Fulbright Canada, As an Individual
Even if you changed that law, I'd query whether companies that don't reside in this country would have to follow that.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Dane Lloyd Conservative Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB
Print is still such a dominant thing, as we've heard from many witnesses. It seems to me that if I went to my local public library, which I do enjoy doing, and I were to take a book off the shelf, I can take it home and with the advent of home copiers and home scanners, which are quite affordable, nobody's going to stop me from scanning things. It's a little bit unenforceable.
Whom do you think the onus should be on to track that sort of thing, or is it basically just an individual's responsibility to do so themselves?
5:05 p.m.
Lawyer, Norton Rose Fulbright Canada, As an Individual
It will be very difficult to track that kind of behaviour and to know what's happening in somebody's home. It would be quite difficult. But if that copy were uploaded onto the Internet somewhere, even if it were in image format, not text format, there are OCR, or optical character recognition, technologies that could locate that. So there are tools that could try to monitor it to help facilitate that process, but it would be very difficult to figure out what's happening in people's private homes.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Dane Lloyd Conservative Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB
I agree that it's basically impossible to enforce.
Mr. Williams, from a publisher's perspective, what's your commentary? Are you engaging in any new technology, or how do you try to protect copyright with your business?
5:05 p.m.
Past President and Publisher, Talonbooks, Association of Books Publishers of British Columbia
We do have some digital rights protection on our PDFs and we rely predominantly on the vendors of ebooks to use the digital rights protection, because we basically sell our books through ebook vendors.
5:05 p.m.
Past President and Publisher, Talonbooks, Association of Books Publishers of British Columbia
It's everyone from Amazon to Apple iTunes. There are probably about 30 different ones, and we use a commercial distributor that basically sends the file to all of them. In some ways, the copyright protection is on them.
On the ebooks that we sell off our own site, we have a limited digital protection, and if we send out desk copies to academics for review, we ask them not to copy them.
Basically, if an individual checks a book out of the library and decides to copy it for private use, that's fine.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
5:05 p.m.
Past President and Publisher, Talonbooks, Association of Books Publishers of British Columbia
There's no problem with that. They just can't sell that copy or use it for commercial purposes.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
5:05 p.m.
Past President and Publisher, Talonbooks, Association of Books Publishers of British Columbia
That's right.
I wanted to make one further comment, because I don't think someone's going to ask me this question, and it's on a bit of a thorny issue. Hopefully, I can do it in a minute.
Basically, at Access Copyright they tried to refine the payment of authors and to distribute the revenues fairly by improving the tracking of which works were being copied, because that's obviously an issue. The schools tracked it for awhile, but they asked within the university systems to provide a database of works that were being copied. There was a push-back on the intellectual freedom side of it from the professors, who argue that now they're giving us knowledge of who's using what, and we can use that knowledge for nefarious purposes.
However, I would argue that the publishers and authors are unlikely to ever come anywhere close to using that knowledge for nefarious purposes, and the only people who are likely to use that are the university administrators who already have that knowledge through their blackboard and course management systems.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Dane Lloyd Conservative Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB
Thank you. Mr Chair, I'm going to take this extra time.
What sort of nefarious purposes could you possibly use that information for?
5:05 p.m.
Past President and Publisher, Talonbooks, Association of Books Publishers of British Columbia
Well, you could try to discriminate politically against somebody who wasn't practising politics to your liking, through the fact that they were adopting certain books and so forth and so on.
That seems to me like almost beyond reasonable to think that authors or publishers whose lives depend on intellectual freedom are going to try to infringe on university professors' rights. The only people who, I think, might be interested in trying to solve problems of political correctness in that sphere are in their own sphere in the university faculty or otherwise. Those people already have that knowledge. I think there's no reason not to keep track of what's being copied and to pay people fairly accordingly.
5:05 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy
She did say seven minutes.
We're going to move to Mr. Sheehan.
You have seven minutes.
5:05 p.m.
Liberal
Terry Sheehan Liberal Sault Ste. Marie, ON
Sure. Thank you very much.
I'm just going to start very quickly with Carellin Brooks.
In your presentation you mentioned that five years ago you had made a presentation or made contributions to this particular review.
Is that correct?
5:10 p.m.
Author, university and college instructor, As an Individual
We went individually and spoke to our MPs.