Industry Committee on Oct. 1st, 2018

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

What is the liability? Can you describe the nature of the liability?

[Ann Mainville-Neeson]

Yes, and I might ask Antoine to take that question.

[Antoine Malek, Senior Regulatory Legal Counsel, TELUS Communications Inc.]

Yes, the issue is that the right belongs to the user. The user is making the recording but storing it on the network, and so they qualify for an exception that is commonly known as the time-shifting exception. The way it's written now, it's personal and based on your ability to create a discrete recording as though it were in your home or on your personal device. When you create it on the network, that doesn't change. You can't share it. It has to be used for your private purposes—

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

It would be massively beneficial if we were to recommend time-shifting rights for companies such as yourselves. That would massively increase your efficiency, because you wouldn't have to keep every different copy; you could keep one united copy.

[Antoine Malek]

Yes. What we're asking is that if you have the one copy on the network and you can share that copy amongst users, it won't be considered a public communication but a private communication for private purposes, and that would bring it within that exception.

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

My final question is on how that would impact the creators. Would it negatively impact the creators if we were to...?

[Antoine Malek]

It wouldn't. No.

Years ago, we had the debate on whether we should allow exceptions to enable this, and we decided yes, but we did it inefficiently. Creators are not deprived of anything that they have currently.

[Ann Mainville-Neeson]

We're not suggesting supplanting the whole video on demand mechanism. We are a video-on-demand provider, and we hope that people will continue to purchase things on video on demand as well.

With regard to the current right that exists for personal use to record, to the extent that it's more and more common to do so on a network rather than individual storage devices, we're merely suggesting that it be done efficiently.

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Would it be cheaper?

[Ann Mainville-Neeson]

For us, yes. We might pass those costs along.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

I would like a little clarification.

At home, I have a PVR. I record everything, and I go home and watch it later. It's recorded on the hard drive; it's not recorded to the network.

[Ann Mainville-Neeson]

Correct.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Then what are you referring to?

[Ann Mainville-Neeson]

We're suggesting that transition, because there is the technology now for you to be able to record directly to the network. The technology is there, but the innovation to do so has been very slow to come to market because of the associated risk for the network provider.

We're suggesting that if there were changes to the act to make it such that we wouldn't incur additional liability, we would bring that innovation to the market.

With regard to your own storage space that you would normally have on your individual hard drive, imagine that you had that up in the cloud, except as the cloud operator, rather than having all of those individual storage spaces, which could mean so much storage....

Of course, there is a cost to that, not only for the the network provider but also from an environmental perspective. The storage space needs cooling and all kinds of electricity usage, so there are various elements of inefficiency here that we're trying to address.

All the things that you store on your own hard drive at home, you would store in the cloud. The cloud operator would then streamline things in the back office. You wouldn't even know. If you record, you retrieve it more or less in the same way. Whether or not it's on your personal drive or in the cloud, it would be seamless to you. On the network side, seamless to the consumer, the network operator would put things together and would not have to save millions and millions of copies of the same thing.

There are ways that we can ensure, with metadata and other information that's saved from someone's individual recording, that if they came in five minutes late or five minutes early—however people wish to record—we'd only be delivering what it is that they've recorded. This type of information can be saved without saving a whole new copy of the same thing.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Sorry; I have to clear this up in my own mind. What you're referring to sounds almost like a Netflix model.

[Ann Mainville-Neeson]

No. Netflix is different.

Netflix is more like our video-on-demand service, where we have negotiated rights and you as an individual haven't decided to record something.

Under the current Copyright Act, you are entitled to record something on your own device or on a network. Netflix or our video-on-demand service is taking that obligation away from you and offering you a service. If you forget to record or you don't want to be bothered to pre-record things, we will offer you the service—access to this library of great content—whether it's through Netflix or the individual video-on-demand services.

The difference there is that those rights are negotiated with the rights holders, and they act independently from the current right that exists now. You still have that option to record on the cloud, whether it's on the cloud or on your own personal hard drive. Those things currently exist independently.

All we're asking is that in the back office of our network operations, we not be forced to do things in such an inefficient way that it makes the service way more costly than it needs to be.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Thank you.

We're going to move to Mr. Jowhari. You have five minutes.

Sorry; I did take away your time.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

That's okay.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you to the witnesses.

Going back along the same line, I do have a box and I do record various programs. I often go and see them, and I decide when to erase the film or program I was watching to clear space so I can save more.

Now, with what you're suggesting, NPVR on network, do we still have that option of being able to watch a selected few and then decide whether our storage size is going to be...and to be able to review it or see it as often as we want?

[Ann Mainville-Neeson]

Yes, it's absolutely intended that you would have some designated amount of storage space in the cloud that you chose to purchase in the same way that the box that you've chosen had a specific size of storage space for your PVR. You would have, in the network, a similar size so that you then choose to make space or not.

The back office elements that I'm talking about here are seamless to you. As a consumer, you would then choose to record certain things. After you've reached your limit, you choose to delete them or not, in order to make space for more, or you purchase more space. We'd be very happy if you purchased more space, but that would be a different business model.

It is certainly not our intention that you would have unlimited recordings simply because we have a more efficient back-end system.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

All we are doing is we are moving our storage into a cloud.

[Ann Mainville-Neeson]

Yes.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

We are saying we want this much storage, and we still select which program we want to record. All you're saying is, “Allow me to streamline my back office and I will provide one copy of that, so when you select, it's going to be there as a place holder rather than your having to copy....” Okay, I understand that.

Okay, I'll go back to Mr. Pelletier. I'm confused. There was some discussion around author, creator and producer.

Also, Madam Messier, you are trying to say, at least the way I understood it, that the producers really need to negotiate their own compensation, and if they don't negotiate, there is really nothing left for them to benefit from when it goes to a different platform. Did I miss something?

[Gabriel Pelletier]

I was saying simply that we negotiate our rights and Mrs. Messier was saying that producers were authors, which I disagree with.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Then help me understand. It's a cryptic thing.