Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and committee members.
My name is Andy Kaplan-Myrth. I am VP, regulatory and carrier affairs at TekSavvy. I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to share our perspective and experience with the Copyright Act.
TekSavvy is an independent Canadian Internet and phone services provider based in southwestern Ontario and Gatineau. We've been serving customers for 20 years, and we now provide service to over 300,000 customers in every province. Over the years, we've consistently defended network neutrality and protected our customers' privacy rights, in the context of copyright and in other contexts.
TekSavvy is different from the other witnesses here today in two important ways, for the purposes of this review. First, while we take copyright infringement very seriously, we do not own media content that's broadcasted or distributed. We're appearing here as an Internet service provider and not as a content provider or rights holder.
Second, to provide services to most of our end-users, we build out our networks to a certain extent and then we use wholesale services that we buy from carriers to cover the last mile, to reach homes and businesses. Because of that wholesale services layer, things sometimes work very differently for us compared to for the incumbent ISPs.
I'm going to focus my comments today on two areas: First, notice and notice and our concerns with the way it currently works; and second, our opposition to proposals to block websites to enforce copyright.
I'll turn first to the notice and notice regime. When notice and notice first came into effect, TekSavvy expended significant resources to develop systems to receive and process notices. Maintaining those systems and hiring staff to process notices continues to be a challenge for a small ISP like TekSavvy. I'll get to our concerns, but I want to start by noting that, in principle at least, notice and notice is a reasonable policy approach to copyright infringement that balances the interests of both rights holders and end-users. At the same time, now that it's been in place for nearly four years, we can see that notice and notice needs some adjustments. We would recommend three tweaks to the current notice and notice regime.
First, a standard is needed to allow ISPs to process notices automatically in a way that's consistent with Canadian law. On average, we receive thousands of infringement notices per week. They come from dozens of companies and use scores of different templates, fewer than half of which can be processed automatically. In effect, notice forwarding is an expensive and difficult service that we provide to rights holders at no cost and for which we're expected to provide a 100% service level. That's not sustainable.
Infringement notices are emails that generally have a block of plain text followed by a block of code. Some senders use notices with a block of code that follows a Canadian standard, which contains all of the elements of the Copyright Act that allow us to forward those notices. If they have the code that follows the Canadian standard, those notices can be processed automatically, without the need for a human to actually open them and review the content.
However, many notices use code adapted from American copyright notices that don't include everything we require in the Canadian Copyright Act. Others are in plain text only; they have no code. When that happens, a human needs to actually read the text of the notice to confirm that it has the required content before it can be forwarded. Both of those notices have to be processed manually. That's work-intensive and slow—and realistically, it is not sustainable as volumes increase. If rights holders were required to use a Canadian notice standard, ISPs would be able to automatically process their notices and better handle a high volume of notices.
Second, a fee that ISPs could charge to process notices should be established. Currently there's essentially no cost for rights holders to send infringement notices. As long as they can send notices at no cost, then even if they get settlements from only a small number of end-users, there will be a business model for rights holders to send greater and greater volumes of notices. Rather, ISPs bear the cost for processing those notices and then answering the many customer questions they generate. Even a small fee would help to transfer the cost back to rights holders from ISPs and constrain the volume of notices. We already get thousands of notices per week. I expect larger ISPs get far more.
I'm not necessarily suggesting we need to reduce those numbers, but we need to create some economic pressure to prevent them from ballooning indefinitely. The Copyright Act already contemplates that a fee could be established, and we recommend that a fee be established to protect ISPs and end-users from being flooded with unlimited numbers of notices.
Third, infringement notices should not be able to contain extraneous content. Many infringement notices contain content that is intimidating to end-users or that can violate customer privacy. In some cases, they don't reference Canadian law at all.
Some notices include content that's more familiar from scams and spam: advertising for other services, settlement offers, or personalized links that secretly reveal information about the end-user to the sender. This puts ISPs in a difficult position, since we're required to forward notices to end-users, including whatever extraneous, misleading or harmful content may be included. This does not serve the purposes of the notice and notice regime, and we recommend that the content or form of notices be prescribed so they can contain only the elements they are required to contain.
Finally, turning briefly to site blocking, earlier this year a group of media companies proposed a new site-blocking regime to the CRTC aimed at policing copyright infringement. TekSavvy opposed that proposal at the CRTC, and we would oppose any similar proposal here. Simply put, such site blocking would be a violation of common carriage and network neutrality without being especially effective, all without any real urgent justification. TekSavvy strongly encourages you to oppose any such site-blocking proposals.
Thank you. I will be pleased to answer any questions.