Evidence of meeting #128 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 copyright.

A video is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Andy Kaplan-Myrth  Vice-President, Regulatory and Carrier Affairs, TekSavvy Solutions Inc.
Robert Malcolmson  Senior Vice-President, Regulatory Affairs, BCE Inc.
David Watt  Senior Vice-President, Regulatory, Rogers Communications Inc.
Cynthia Rathwell  Vice-President, Legislative and Policy Strategy, Shaw Communications Inc.
David de Burgh Graham  Laurentides—Labelle, Lib.
Mark Graham  Senior Legal Counsel, BCE Inc.
Dan Albas  Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, CPC
Kristina Milbourn  Director, Copyright and Broadband, Rogers Communications Inc.
Michael Chong  Wellington—Halton Hills, CPC
Jay Kerr-Wilson  Legal Counsel, Fasken Martineau, Shaw Communications Inc.

4:25 p.m.

Senior Vice-President, Regulatory Affairs, BCE Inc.

4:25 p.m.

Conservative

Dane Lloyd Conservative Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB

Okay.

How much time do I have left?

4:25 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy

You have thirty seconds.

4:25 p.m.

Conservative

Dane Lloyd Conservative Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB

When we're talking about a criminal violation, organized copyright theft, what sorts of examples can you provide? What would be an example of an organized copyright threat?

4:25 p.m.

Senior Legal Counsel, BCE Inc.

Mark Graham

I think the best examples are the illegal IPTV services, as they call them, that are sometimes being operated. Just to give you an example, these are people who set up 60 often fraudulently obtained TV receivers in basements across the country, upload all the channels to an illegal cable service, and then sell subscriptions to that service for $10 a month, composed entirely of stolen content, with not one dollar going to—

4:25 p.m.

Conservative

Dane Lloyd Conservative Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB

Is it realistic for the government to catch these people? Is there realistic availability?

4:25 p.m.

Senior Legal Counsel, BCE Inc.

Mark Graham

It is, in fact. Lots of them are being identified all the time by rights holders in the system, but we don't have the remedies available now to address this.

4:25 p.m.

Conservative

Dane Lloyd Conservative Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB

Thank you.

September 26th, 2018 / 4:25 p.m.

Senior Vice-President, Regulatory, Rogers Communications Inc.

David Watt

If I could interject, that's exactly the intent of both the FairPlay application and the injunctive relief, that there would be an order to ISPs to block the IP address from which that stream is coming.

4:25 p.m.

Conservative

Dane Lloyd Conservative Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB

I hoped I would get a follow-up, but—

4:25 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy

You'll have time to come back.

4:25 p.m.

Senior Vice-President, Regulatory, Rogers Communications Inc.

David Watt

That's the commercial entity that's doing it, not the end-user. It's the person who has the server with that IP address on it. It's to block that.

4:25 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy

We're going to move on to Ms. Caesar-Chavannes.

You have five minutes.

4:25 p.m.

Celina Caesar-Chavannes Whitby, Lib.

Thank you.

Thank you to the witnesses who are here today.

Mr. Watt, you indicated that you've watched the rise in streaming of stolen content with deep concern. The remedies under the act, you mentioned, are insufficient. You provided some recommendations for amendments. My question is, in addition to amendments to the act, what new tools and technology are available to help with dispelling your concerns about streaming.

4:30 p.m.

Senior Vice-President, Regulatory, Rogers Communications Inc.

David Watt

In terms of the new tools and technologies, I think many of them exist today. The Sandvine analytics allow us to identify the high upstream loaders. As Mr. Graham mentioned, the question is, how do people obtain this content? They will literally set up 60 set-top boxes, tune one to each channel and then stream it 24 hours a day.

With the analytics, with the new technology, that is how we're able to identify those upstream streams that are sending traffic volumes, which really can only be when they're doing something of this nature.

4:30 p.m.

Whitby, Lib.

Celina Caesar-Chavannes

Is there anybody else—TekSavvy, Shaw?

4:30 p.m.

Vice-President, Regulatory and Carrier Affairs, TekSavvy Solutions Inc.

Andy Kaplan-Myrth

I'm just thinking about those high-upload sorts of streams. Service providers could cut off those users if they wanted to by publishing Internet traffic management policies, for which there's a framework through the CRTC. They would have to establish those guidelines and then enforce them. They can already do that on their own networks, as far as I know. It's certainly not a copyright policy issue.

4:30 p.m.

Whitby, Lib.

Celina Caesar-Chavannes

Thank you.

I'm sorry, Mr. Chair. I'm going to split my time with Mr. Lametti.

One of the main arguments made by opponents to the safe harbours in the act is a challenge to the “dumb pipe” theory. Can you describe the extent to which ISPs can identify the content of data they transmit?

4:30 p.m.

Vice-President, Regulatory and Carrier Affairs, TekSavvy Solutions Inc.

Andy Kaplan-Myrth

I can answer that for TekSavvy, but I would be very interested to hear about it, as well, from carriers.

For us it largely depends on the platform and on what equipment we have in place. We can see whatever information the carriers give us. We're wholesale providers and so we largely rely on the carriers for information about the actual connection that our end-users have. Where that information is available to us, we would know the volume, how many gigabytes a person has downloaded in a certain period of time.

We could put equipment in place that would look into that content and find out what it is. We do not do that, so we have no visibility into the content of any end-user traffic. It goes further than that. It's not just content; it's what protocol is on the Internet. We just don't watch that or keep track of it, but there is equipment available, and we would be able to use that if we were interested in tracking that kind of information about our users.

4:30 p.m.

Senior Vice-President, Regulatory, Rogers Communications Inc.

David Watt

Yes, there's the packet inspection equipment that is available to provide insight into what is buried in the packets, but effectively, we cannot use it to throttle or discriminate between the bits. It's really for informational purposes only.

4:30 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy

You have 30 seconds.

4:30 p.m.

Liberal

David Lametti Liberal LaSalle—Émard—Verdun, QC

I've blanked as to whether Shaw is part of FairPlay. I just want to ask, generally, about FairPlay.

If, as you said, you are going after the big sites that are using disputable content, why do we need a separate body in order to adjudicate that? We have the Federal Court. Let's say we do something on injunctive relief, such that you could get an injunction. Why would we not use the Federal Court system, which has, I think, an impressive record on intellectual property and copyright, expertise on intellectual property, generally, and a strong record of fairness with respect to IP? Why would we create another body? Let me flip it around. We have notice and notice in Canada precisely to avoid the abuses of notice and takedown in the American system. Why would we want to potentially open up a system that's potentially open to abuse when we could use our Federal Court system?

4:35 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy

We're not going to have time to answer that, but we will be able to come back on the next round, so ponder your thoughts on that one.

We're going to move to Mr. Chong.

You have five minutes.

4:35 p.m.

Michael Chong Wellington—Halton Hills, CPC

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses for appearing.

It seems to me that this is a very similar problem to the one we have with all of these illegal phone calls purporting to come from CRA. Over the last number of years, tens of thousands of Canadians have been harassed by these calls. Over $10 million has been stolen from Canadians because of this, and there are really two ways to go about shutting this activity down. One is to block the phone numbers; the alternative is to shut down these call centres.

I don't think blocking the phone numbers is a realistic way of going about it, because anybody can get a burner cellphone and get a new phone number pretty quickly to restart the scam. Thus, shutting down these call centres is pretty important. Many of them are outside of the country, in places such as Mumbai, India. I think that's the solution to it.

Similarly, when we're looking at illegal set-top boxes or illegal streaming services, we can try to ban the sale of these illegal set-top boxes, but I don't think that's realistic. There's new technology, new hardware, new software coming along all the time. Open platforms such as Android allow people to produce these programs. I don't think that's the solution. Really, to me, it seems that the solution is to shut down the servers that are hosting this illegal streaming of content.

My first question is, where are most of these servers located, in Canada or outside of Canada?

I'll direct my questions to BCE.

4:35 p.m.

Senior Vice-President, Regulatory Affairs, BCE Inc.

Robert Malcolmson

Your analogy to call blocking and spam is apt.