Industry Committee on May 11th, 2018

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Welcome back, as we continue our study of the five-year statutory review of copyright.

You are the last panel of the day for us. We started in Halifax on Monday, went to Montreal on Tuesday, Toronto on Wednesday, Winnipeg yesterday, and today we are here with our second panel.

First of all, I want to thank our panellists for coming in today. We've learned a lot, and we continue to learn. It's like an onion. Every time we think we know something, we peel a layer, and something else pops up. A lot of the questions that you'll be asked today are meant to probe, to dig deep, and to try to get a clearer understanding of copyright legislation.

As we start, you'll each have five to seven minutes to make your presentation. After that, we'll go into our questions.

From the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia, we have Kevin Williams, Past President and Publisher of Talonbooks. As individuals, we have Jerry Thompson, Author and Journalist; Maya Medeiros, Lawyer, Norton Rose Fulbright Canada; and Carellin Brooks, Author, and university and college instructor.

Am I pronouncing your name right, Carellin?

[Carellin Brooks, Author, university and college instructor, As an Individual]

No, it's actually Carellin.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

My apologies, Carellin. Thank you very much for correcting me.

We're going to start with Mr. Williams. You have up to seven minutes.

[Kevin Williams, Past President and Publisher, Talonbooks, Association of Books Publishers of British Columbia]

I'd like to think that we're going to be your most vivacious panel of the day. That will help you out.

As mentioned, I am the proprietor, president, and publisher of Talonbooks, one of Canada's oldest independent literary presses. We celebrated our 50th anniversary in book publishing last year. We've always been independently owned. This is my 42nd year in the book trade. I spent 10 years as a retailer. I spent 21 years as the manager, executive, and partner of a distribution/publisher firm called Raincoast Books, which is one of Canada's largest distributors in town.

In 2007 my wife and I bought Talonbooks from the previous owners. For the last 11 years, I have been an independent literary publisher, publishing works of drama, poetry, books in translation from Quebec literature, indigenous studies, and social issues. I also served for a few years on the Access Copyright board. I've been on the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia board for 12 years. So I have had a lot of opportunity to become familiar with the issues.

The issue from the point of view of independent Canadian publishers and from the point of view of Canadian authors is that our works are being systematically copied and used in educational settings, both at the K-to-12 and university levels, for commercial purposes. They are being used for course packs and for delivery of what would technically be textbook material. I know that people like to interpret the current Copyright Act and the fair use provision as meaning that they are free to copy our works and use them for course packs and in these large-use situations, but fair use implies that there's no commercial damage suffered and that there's no use in terms of commercial purposes. But that is exactly what's going on.

To our point of view, the people who least can afford it in the whole chain of endeavour are the ones who are being asked to sacrifice. They are basically being told that the university and teachers and everybody who works in the system, the infrastructure, the administration, should all be paid and should get benefits. The people who don't have benefits, and whose salaries are on average about $40,000 a year, are the ones who therefore should sacrifice their hard work. My contention is that in the long run, you're crushing the spirit of Canadian publishers and creators. We will gradually create a situation where we no longer have the extremely high level of authors and independent publishing that Canada enjoys today, whose works are known around the world and around the country for being among the very best.

The thing that's unique about Talonbooks, and that perhaps goes against some of the comments you've heard today, is that we're an independent literary press, where 65% to 70% of our sales are academic or school course adoptions. Our literature and our books bring to light Canadian stories by indigenous authors, by diverse authors, by authors from the margins of the community, and by some of Canada's most prestigious poets. They are used throughout academia. It's the same with our drama. All the great plays are used in academic settings. That's where most of our income comes from.

People ask, “What are the numbers?” Well, our average sales a year are about $400,000. Our income from Access Copyright prior to the change to the Copyright Act averaged $18,500 a year. Our income over the last two years has been $3,700 a year and it's dropping. It's obviously a significant decline. Now, $18,500 is about 4.6% of our sales, so it's a substantial number of sales, but licence sales are basically pure margin when they arrive. As $18,500 represents 9.25% of our gross margin, or about 10% of our gross margin, we would have to generate another $40,000 to $45,000 in sales to replace that.

Our sales have been relatively steady. We've maintained anywhere between $330,000 to $400,000 a year ever since, say, 2005, all through the difficult downturns, the advent of e-books, and all sorts of other stuff. Basically, trying to increase sales against the downward pressures of markets is extremely difficult. The overall book market in North America is not shrinking or gaining. It's the same. If anybody increases sales, you have to take market share from other people.

I think we've been somewhat successful taking market share from other people, but I can tell you here and now that there is absolutely no way to replace $20,000 a year, or 10% of our gross margin, on an ongoing basis, out on the open marketplace. That's not going to happen.

What does this mean from the point of view of the authors? For every cent we get, the author gets a cent. Our authors have also foregone the $20,000 a year in income from Access Copyright. For example, I was talking to a magazine writer today, and she said, “Be sure to tell them how important the cheque from Access Copyright has been to me every year as a magazine writer, being a crucial part of my magazine income and often enabling me to produce feature articles, where there is a long period of play before we are paid.”

First of all, I'd like to say that the collective licensing process, I think, is recognized as being the easiest one. I think the York case pointed out that the systematic copying of 600 million or 700 million copies a year is anything but fair use. In fact, probably the best way to deal with that is through a universal licence. I definitely support that point of view.

I go to academic conferences all the time, and the profs there all tell me that they use our stuff all the time. I know how much of our materials were being used before, and if anything, Talon is a stronger publisher today than it was over the last few years, with best sellers and a few indigenous books that have won numerous prizes. We have a Griffin Poetry Prize. We have a Governor General's Award winner in drama. We have another Griffin Poetry Prize winner, an indigenous author. We have Mercedes Eng, from a Chinese-Canadian background, who just won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. We have a book by another indigenous author, who won the Lambda award, and we have another indigenous author whose book was shortlisted for the B.C. Book Prize.

None of these books comes without the production of intellectual capital on the part of the author and the very long value-added chain publishers go through. I know that all our works are being well used in greater quantities than they were used before. I have not received a single request for permission for use from the University of British Columbia since the change to the Copyright Act. I have not received a single permission request from the University of Victoria, and I could go through a litany of just about every university in the country. The only requests I have received to use our materials are from the people who used to request them before: the University of Guelph and a couple of others, four of five of them. The ones we got before the act changed are the same ones we get now. I've had nothing, zero, from the rest of them.

What have I been told? I've been told by professors at the Canadian Association of Theatre Research conference that it's very common for them to sit down in a classroom and for the whole classroom to check out our e-book from the library, and everyone can use that for a course pack. The fact is, our licence to the library never included the right for them to be doing that. There is no enforcement; there is no prevention of that.

I asked to present a picture today that we were tweeted on social media, but was not given leave to, of a high school class reading one of our most successful indigenous authors, Drew Hayden Taylor. His works are used all the time. The classroom is proudly reading a play called Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth, and you can see one person in the classroom holding a copy of the book that's been cut, and every single other person in that class is reading a photocopy.

They'll say that it's not up to them to enforce people copying whole works, but they are copying whole works in the library, so we need some kind of compensation to at least offset this wholesale adaptation of our materials and free use.

The royalty on one book to an author is $1.69. Basically, we have 20 or 30 books in that classroom, and the suggested royalty for K to 12 is $2.41 per student. Basically, they're suggesting that they pay, on an annual basis, the royalty for one and a half books to make up for the millions of copies they are copying. That may not be an adequate fee, but it's better than paying nothing and saying, “We should be able to copy all these materials for free. Why don't you creators and publishers donate your works to the system?”

I met last year with the Ministry of Education—

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

I'm sorry, I'm going to have to cut you off, because we have to move on. I'm sure we're going to have lots of questions for you.

We're going to go to Mr. Thompson, please. You have up to seven minutes.

[Jerry Thompson, Author and Journalist, As an Individual]

Thank you.

I am the author of a book about earthquakes published by HarperCollins. I have written for Reader's Digest, Equinox, Vancouver Magazine, and The Globe and Mail. I've made documentaries for CBC, CTV, Global, Discovery, etc. I'm also a member of the Federation of BC Writers, the Writers Guild of Canada, and the Writers' Union of Canada. I didn't realize I would actually have to do that, eating into my time.

My presentation is called “Stealing from Canada's Writers”.

When York University published guidelines in 2017 stating that the revised Copyright Act allowed their faculty and staff to copy up to 10% of a book without compensation, including entire chapters, poems, and articles, the Federal Court of Canada said, “no”. York's policy was struck down. Yet here we are, millions of stolen pages later, still fighting the fight, and still paying lawyers' fees. A cynic might think Canada's big universities and school boards are trying to bleed us writers dry.

The illegal copying of works created by Canadian writers is only the latest twist in the ongoing saga of digital piracy. Rent any DVD movie and you will see a short video warning against the theft of intellectual property. The writing, directing, acting, filming, and editing of a movie involves years of creative work. Illegal copying of the final product is a crime in both the United States and Canada. We've all seen the FBI logo and the caution so many times now that people tend to ignore it, but the tag line is clear: piracy is not a victimless crime.

So why are provincial governments and education administrators behaving like modern-day pirates? Why the attack on Canada's writers?

In British Columbia, the Ministry of Education recently joined Ontario and others in a lawsuit against Access Copyright, the agency that collects the royalties due to Canadian writers and publishers. The issue is the copying of millions of pages of non-fiction books, novels, poetry, and magazine articles for educational purposes under the guise of the fair use concept, which was rejected, shot down, in the case against York. As most of you know, the Copyright Act was reviewed and partially modernized in 2012. Somehow the definition of fair use got muddied or lost in translation.

How much of a book, article, or poem can be copied for free? Well, we obviously don't agree. The lack of clarity that came from the 2012 review fed the appetites of anti-copyright activists, who encouraged university and public school administrators to think that a “new” consensus had been reached. They argued that quick and easy public access to information was more important than intellectual property rights, and that it was more important for cash-starved school systems to get something for free than it was to pay the workers who had created the books and the poems and the articles. The argument is and always was bogus. It was the same empty-minded, moral sludge used previously to justify the wholesale downloading and theft of music and movies. Digital technology made it too easy to steal. So, what the heck, everybody else is doing it, so school boards and universities might as well get in on the looting, too, eh?

“Information wants to be free” came the cry of the ethically challenged. Yes, sure, free until it's your information that someone else wants to steal. Creativity is work. Books are the product of work, just like baking bread or building cars. You don't expect to get bread for free. You certainly don't expect to get a car for free. We all pay for the work of a teacher or a professor, so why should anyone expect a writer to work for free? Which brings us back to the current lawsuit. There never was a new consensus about what constitutes fair use. The court ruled clearly against York's libertarian twaddle. Yet for reasons that defy common sense, school administrators across the country chose to ignore that decision. They pounced on the so-called lack of clarity in defining fair use and decided they could stop paying to copy. The Association of Canadian Publishers reports that more than 600 million pages of published works have been copied for free by the education sector since 2013. But—hang on—the ruling against York has not been overturned. It is still the law of the land. Why would any clear-thinking school administrator or provincial government be pressing ahead with yet another lawsuit that uses faulty reasoning to get something for nothing at the expense of some of Canada's poorest-paid workers? It boggles the mind.

A few lucky writers in Canada also have jobs in universities or as school teachers and therefore have a foot in both camps, but most don't. Most writers have no sinecure, no reliable monthly paycheque, no job security, and no benefits. A recent survey of writers nationwide documented that 83% earn $15,000 or less per year from writing. In other words, writers in Canada earn significantly below the national median. If illegal copying of their work sounds like an unfair labour practice, you're right, it is.

I do realize and sympathize with the fact that years of budget cuts to education have caused schools and universities to look for some way to cut corners, but writers are not in a position to subsidize underfunded schools. You cannot cover a budget shortfall in public education by stealing from writers.

As a writer, my message to this committee is: please help us clarify fair use as quickly as possible. We can't afford to wait for a long, drawn-out deliberation. Canadian writers and publishers have been losing $30 million a year since 2013. That's a lot of unpaid rent, and unbought groceries, day care, prescription medicines, you name it. Writers are not rich people. This loss of income hurts. Stealing from writers is not fair use. Piracy is not a victimless crime.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Thank you very much.

We're going to move to Ms. Medeiros for seven minutes.

[Maya Medeiros, Lawyer, Norton Rose Fulbright Canada, As an Individual]

I'm an intellectual property lawyer, and I also studied computer science and math before going to law school, with a focus on artificial intelligence. I'm going to provide an overview of artificial intelligence technologies, and I'll highlight issues that impact copyright in relation to these innovations.

The term “artificial intelligence” is often applied when machines mimic cognitive functions that humans associate with the human mind, such as learning and problem solving. It's a field of computer science that includes something called “machine learning”. Machine learning can automate decision-making using programming rules that dynamically update. This involves training the system using large datasets. Supervised learning involves labelling these datasets, such as “cats” and “dogs” for images of cats and dogs. Unsupervised learning involves training data without those sets, and clusters are discovered automatically.

AI learns to think by reading, listening, and viewing data, which can include copyrighted works such as images, video, text, and other data. It's different from typical software because it automates decisions that are not normally in the realm of computers, and then the code adapts or changes over time in response to the learning of this data. This triggers new ethical and legal issues, which is what we as a law firm look at.

One of the issues is that AI systems need to meet certain ethical standards, and those ethical standards often embed rights and values. One issue that comes up from this point is that there is an increase in biased AI systems, and we're trying to discover why these systems are so biased. Consider a very simple example. In 2016, there was a event called Beauty.AI, an international beauty contest judged by an AI system. Six thousand people from more than 100 countries submitted photos to be judged, but the vast majority of the winners were white-skinned. Upon investigation, they realized that the AI system had been trained on hundreds of thousands of images that did not include non-white faces, so the training dataset was not sufficiently diverse.

Other examples relate to human resource tools, credit scoring, as well as policing and public safety. These biases can cause harm and inequality. Responsible AI should maximize benefits instead of these harms.

What does this have to do with copyright law? The AI training datasets can involve copyrighted works such as images, video, text, and data. The training process can involve reproductions of the training data, and these can be temporary reproductions to extract features of the data that can be discarded after the training process. An AI system can rely on the factual nature of the works to understand these patterns. The AI system algorithm is separate from the training data, but the training data may result in an improved or optimized algorithm. It is unclear whether the use of copyrighted works for training an AI system is considered copyright infringement if the author's or copyright owner's permission is not obtained. This uncertainty exists even if the initial training is done for research purposes—an enumerated fair dealing ground—and then the trained system is eventually used for commercial purposes or made available under a licensing arrangement. This uncertainty can limit the data that is used by AI innovators to train the AI system. The quality of the dataset will impact the quality of the resulting trained algorithm. There's a common saying in computer science: garbage in, garbage out.

There are public or open datasets available, but they may not be made up of the best-quality data. In fact, a number of examples show that the available open datasets under different licensing arrangement actually do result in biased algorithms due to gender inequality in the underlying datasets. An algorithm trained on this sub-optimal data may result in a generated bias.

An AI developer can develop or generate their own large body of training data, but this may not always be feasible if a certain quality or type of data is required. For example, when training a face-recognition algorithm, it's desirable to have a diverse dataset with thousands of images representing different types of people. However, this may be very difficult for a company to generate unless they are a large social media company, for example, collecting a lot of images on a daily basis.

A recent decision also creates additional uncertainty when that machine-generated raw data is a copyrighted work, because human skill and judgment were used to set parameters around creating that data. This creates additional uncertainties about the scope of copyright protections afforded to data and what can be used for training these systems. Further, even temporary reproductions of copyrighted works for technical purposes can be considered copyright infringement, which creates additional uncertainty.

Another issue relating to AI systems and copyrighted works is that they're now starting to generate new works that can be considered literary works, artistic works, and musical works. The role played by a human in the creation of these works will vary, depending on the technology. An example is a system called AIVA, which actually composes classical music and has an album out. It has already released an album and it also has other tracks available.

It's difficult under the current copyright law to clearly define whether these machine-generated works are protectable as copyright works. It also shows that the nature of these technologies is changing. We need to consider how copyright can address these future technologies and uses and resulting works. This uncertainty creates uncertainty around ownership of these works and the commercialization of these works.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Brooks, you have up to seven minutes.

[Carellin Brooks]

Thank you so much.

My name is Carellin Brooks. I am a writer and a member of the Writers' Union of Canada. I was on the board of the Vancouver Public Library for eight years.

I knew that I wanted to be a writer from the time that I was a very small child. I wanted to contribute to Canadian stories, I guess. I didn't quite think of it that way when I was six years old, but I wanted to do that. When I became an instructor, I also wanted to represent the work of my fellow writers in the classroom. I take pride in introducing students and readers to Canadian writing.

When the 2012 Copyright Act was under consultation, I and other people came and talked to MPs about it. It seems that none of what we said at that time went into the actual act. Before the Copyright Act, we had Access Copyright payments that came to us every year. As other speakers have said, those payments have dropped by half or more. I think one of the other speakers said that 83% of Canadian writers make under $15,000 a year from their writing. I'm definitely in that category. I just cashed my most recent royalty cheque for my most recent book—this is the book—and it was $48. The book was also translated into French.

I've worked at universities, including the University of British Columbia and Kwantlen currently. Both of them opted out of paying their Access Copyright fees since the modernization of the Copyright Act in 2012. This puts me in a difficult position as an instructor and as a writer. From surveys that the Writers' Union runs nationally, I know that copyright is one of the top hot-button issues among my writer peers. I feel that if I am providing Canadian content in the classroom in the form of photocopies, I am undercutting them and undermining them. I can't, in good conscience, hand out photocopies of works that I want my students to see. I have to do a weird little workaround where I display it on the board but don't give everyone a copy.

One time, I knew in advance that I was going to teach a course. I contacted some writers I knew and asked them individually for permission to use their work. They said yes. They did not charge me anything for this. However, this isn't really a viable solution for me. University instruction is in some cases itself a bit precarious. Sometimes, depending on where you are on the list, you don't know if you're going to be teaching until a few weeks or even a few days before your courses start. Even if you had the will, then, you just wouldn't have the time to go and individually ask each author if you could use that person's work.

When students tell me that they are going to copy a chapter, I have to put my fingers in my ears and make that little singing “la-la-la” noise, because I don't want to hear it and I don't want to lecture them. I often feel like I am the only person in the setting who cares about this stuff. I talk to my peers, other instructors, and they don't have any consciousness of why it would be an issue to photocopy large amounts of book chapters, articles, and so on and so forth. There is no issue for them in terms of the ethics of that.

The Copyright Act of 2012 has had huge impacts. It has had a huge negative impact on me and on the other writers I know. It has also had a huge impact on our families. I am the sole breadwinner in my household, and there was a time when I would use my Access Copyright cheque to pay for my Christmas. Access Copyright doesn't do that anymore. So I would love to see some changes to the Copyright Act.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Thank you very much.

We're going to jump right into questions.

We'll start off with you, Mr. Sheehan. You have seven minutes.

[Terry Sheehan, Liberal, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Thank you very much.

Those were fantastic presentations. I really do appreciate them.

As we undertake this study, we're trying to figure out how to support our creative economy—our authors and other people working in that field. I have friends and family working in that field too, and I know how much work is put into a book. For one young lady I know, from her initial idea to working with the illustrators to finally getting it published, it took four years for her first book. She's travelling around B.C. right now; I don't know where she is.

So I can truly appreciate that. The voices are important. We need to hear Canadian voices and indigenous voices as well. I truly appreciated your presentations. We also want to make sure that it's very strong, so that university and college students are benefiting, and from a number of different testimonies, we've discovered that there are policies in place in some schools and some not. It seems to be quite irregular.

I'll start with you, Jerry. Can you give me a ballpark idea of how much of your revenue has come from copyright over the last five years?

[Jerry Thompson]

Unfortunately, I can't give you a number on that. My wife runs the company, so I don't really know.

[Terry Sheehan, Liberal, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

No problem.

[Jerry Thompson]

I've only collected royalties from this for a couple of years. It took me a while to learn that Access Copyright even existed.

The short answer is that I don't know the answer to that, but I think Ms. Brooks' answer would be the same. I have received a few thousand dollars from them, but I don't really know the number. I'm sort of focusing my message, instead of on the exact dollars, on the morality of it, on the notion of why this system expects me, the guy at the bottom end of the food chain in publishing....

Aren't we asking professors and university administrators to contribute 10% of their income to the greater good of the public education system? When MPs give up part of their income to help finance the deficit in schools, come back and ask me to donate free publishing.

[Terry Sheehan, Liberal, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

So you attribute a lot of this to the deficit in the school systems. I heard that over and over again in your testimony.

[Jerry Thompson]

Yes. I mean, let's face it, we had a licensing system in place before that was working. People may have disagreed about percentages, but still, it was working to some extent.

Am I right?

He's been at this a lot longer than I have, and has far more background.

From a writer's perspective, I made documentaries for years, for CBC and others, and whenever we wanted to buy somebody's archive footage, my wife and I had to purchase a licence to use that. It was always a licence for a limited time, usually about seven years, and it gave us permission for the commercial use of that footage for those seven years. After that, we didn't have the permission to use their stock footage. Therefore, we also couldn't sell our finished film that contained their stock footage.

It was a situation I understood and agreed with. I knew that those were the rules of the game. You buy a licence and you pay. Why would it be different for writing a book? I don't think it should be.

[Terry Sheehan, Liberal, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

That was going to be one of my questions.

Too, Jerry, we had some testimony earlier from the Fédération nationale des communications. You just brought up your journalistic background. They're the ones who advocate for news and media professionals. They presented a number of recommendations to this committee, hoping to support the remuneration of Canadian journalists. These recommendations included the creation of a new category of protected work—journalistic work—as well as the establishment of a collective rights society charged with defending the copyright of journalists and working to ensure fair compensation.

To start, can you provide the committee with a sense of how the remuneration of Canadian journalists has evolved in the last 10 years?

[Jerry Thompson]

I don't have details on that, because I worked at CBC in-house or on contract for about 20 years, and then got mad and quit one day. After that, I was an independent filmmaker for another 20 years. My income for the last 20 years has all been mixed up in trying to put together money to make independent documentaries, so there isn't a clear and simple answer to that in my particular case.

For example, as I was explaining earlier, if we went to pitch a film, to make a film, which is equivalent really to writing a book except that it's more expensive, we would get 15% of the budget in a licence fee from a broadcaster. Say CBC says, “Yes, we'll green-light your project”, you get 15% from the CBC, and you have to raise 85% from a whole slew of other things, including tax credits and all kinds of stuff like that. Finally, you're the last guy to get paid because you have to pay the subcontractors that you hire, the cameramen, and the musicians who do the soundtrack for it. It's a really convoluted way to make a living, and you basically never do more than break even most of the time.

I had no idea until I dropped out of television and decided I wanted to do this for a living how much worse it is in publishing. I thought television was messed up.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Terry Sheehan, Liberal, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

In general, would you agree with the recommendations that they were trying to put forward with regard to Canadian journalists?

[Jerry Thompson]

Absolutely, and it still goes back to the concept of the ethics of the thing. When people say it's too hard to keep track of all of these things—thousands of things get written in magazine articles; things get published; and if it's a hot topic, an instructor might need that on short notice at the university and they would say, “Gee, I can't go through all the rigmarole of paperwork to try to track down who I should be paying for this”—that's bogus. You can track anything with computers now. You can use bar codes to figure out how many times something gets used, whether it's an article, a poem, or a chapter. Every time it gets used, it should be paid for. Why should it be otherwise? None of the rest of the people in this room expect to work for free.

[Terry Sheehan, Liberal, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Thanks.

I'm good.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Mr. Lloyd, you have seven minutes.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Thank you.

Thank you to all the panellists for being here. I really appreciate your testimony.

My first line of questioning is going to be put to Ms. Medeiros.

It's very interesting having you here, because we haven't had anyone talk about AI or new technologies besides just the general digital sphere. It does seem that one of the big problems we've been hearing about on this committee as we've travelled is that the digital age has changed everything in terms of e-books and resources available online, but we haven't had a corresponding rise in technology to protect copyright, so copyright is just being abused with this great technology that we have. It's being misused, but we don't have the technology to protect copyright.

I noted in your background here that you're interested in blockchain technology. Can you maybe comment on the possibilities of blockchain technology being used to protect copyright?