Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.
My name is David Watt and I am senior vice-president, regulatory, at Rogers Communications. I am here with Kristina Milbourn, director of copyright and broadband at Rogers. We appreciate the opportunity to share our views with you today.
Rogers is a diversified Canadian communications and media company offering wireless, high-speed Internet, cable television, and radio and television broadcasting. We support a copyright act that takes a balanced approach to the interests of rights holders, users and intermediaries, thereby optimizing the growth of digital services and investments in both innovation and content. As a member of both the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and the Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright, we support their comments in this review.
When we appeared before this committee five years ago, we defended the notice and notice regime as a useful deterrent to copyright infringement occurring through the downloading of movies using BitTorrent protocols. Since then, Canadians have fundamentally changed the way they obtain and view stolen content. A November 2017 survey commissioned by ISED and Canadian Heritage found that Canadians are increasingly using streaming to view stolen content online. Sandvine, a Canadian company that conducts network analytics, reported that in 2017 roughly 15% of Canadian households were streaming stolen content using preloaded set-top boxes. These boxes access an IP address that provides the stream. While illegal downloading remains a major problem for rights holders, illegal streaming has become the primary vehicle by which thieves make the stolen content available. We need new tools in the act to combat this new threat to the rights holders and to our Canadian broadcasting system.
We have watched the rise of streaming stolen content with deepening concern. We have taken action using the existing remedies under the act, but these remedies are insufficient. We need new tools in the act to combat this new streaming threat. We recommend two amendments to the act that will make a difference.
First, the act should make it a criminal violation for a commercial operation to profit from the theft and making available of exclusive and copyrighted content on streaming services. In our experience, the existing civil prohibitions are not strong enough to deter this type of content theft.
Second, the act should allow for injunctive relief against all of the intermediaries that form part of the online infrastructure distributing stolen content. An example is a blocking order against an ISP requiring an ISP to disable access to stolen content available on preloaded set-top boxes.
This would be similar to action taken in over 40 countries, including jurisdictions such as the U.K. and Australia. The FairPlay coalition, of which Rogers is a participant, asked for this in its application to the CRTC filed earlier this year. This injunctive relief would serve to support and supplement that application.
In addition to these amendments addressing illegal streaming, we also have recommendations for improving the notice and notice regime. These proposals would protect Canadians against settlement demands and copyright trolling.
First, we fully support the government's position that future copyright notices must exclude settlement demands. We recommend that notice and notice provisions be amended to prohibit rights holders from making settlement demands in notices. We also recommend that the government prescribe, by regulation, the form and content of legitimate notices that an ISP would have to process under the act. A prescribed web form would prevent improper information from being entered into the notice.
Second, this is with reference to the case recently determined by the Supreme Court of Canada regarding reasonable costs of an order to disclose information, or a Norwich order. This order is the subsequent step after a notice and notice form has been sent out for those people who wish to pursue further action. The minister should set a rate per lookup and attach it as a schedule to regulations made under the act. Based on Rogers' costs, a rate of $100 per IP address would be appropriate. This approach would provide transparency to all those involved in Norwich order requests.
These are our brief comments, and we'd be pleased to answer any questions you may have.