Thank you.
Mr. Chair and members of the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology, on behalf of Facebook, I want to thank you for giving us the opportunity to speak to you today.
My name is Kevin Chan, and I'm the head of public policy at Facebook Canada. I'm joined by Probir Mehta, the head of global intellectual property policy.
At Facebook, we encourage creativity and the spread of culture online. We believe that, through Facebook, content creators from all walks of life, including musicians, sports leagues, publishers and television or film studios, are given new ways to share their content, attract the offline audience and promote their creativity.
Facebook also gives rights holders tools to protect and promote their content, while protecting the right to freedom of expression for all users.
I want to start by sharing some concrete examples of how we're working with artists, creators and cultural institutions across the country to promote and empower their work.
Many copyright holders have Facebook pages and use our tools to promote and expand the reach of their content. At Facebook Canada we have a partnerships team whose mandate is to work with publishers, artists and creators to help them maximize the value of the Facebook platform by reaching new audiences, engaging directly with fans and promoting their work here in Canada and around the world.
For the last two years, this team has led a partnership with the National Arts Centre, helping it fulfill its mandate of being an arts centre for all Canadians across the country. For the recent Canada 150 celebrations, Facebook was proud to have been the NAC's digital partner as its musicians and artists travelled across the country connecting with Canadians both physically and online.
To give you just one example, with respect to the NAC English Theatre's recent Tartuffe tour to Newfoundland, the sharing of some of the tour's content on Facebook allowed the NAC to greatly expand their footprint in the province, reaching over 395,000 Newfoundlanders online, or about 75% of the province's population.
We're also focused on supporting emerging creators, helping them engage and grow their community, manage their presence and build a business on Facebook. For three years we have supported emerging Canadian music artists through the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences master class program, participating as mentors on how to reach new audiences on Facebook.
Finally, many cultural institutions are non-profit organizations with charitable status, and earlier this month we were very excited to have launched several new ways for charities in Canada to fundraise directly on Facebook. We make this service available without charging any fees and are thrilled that around the world over $1 billion has already been raised in this way directly on Facebook. We are looking forward to having an equally positive impact in Canada.
Facebook takes the protection of rights holders' intellectual property seriously. To that end, Facebook has implemented a number of measures to help rights holders protect their rights through a rigorous global program to combat copyright infringement.
We have three pillars to our intellectual property program.
First, our terms of service and community standards are the foundation our platform is built on. They expressly prohibit users from posting content that infringes any third parties' IP rights or otherwise violates the law, and they state that users who post infringing content will face penalties up to and including having their accounts disabled.
Second, our global IP protection program provides rights holders with opportunities to report content that they believe is infringing. We have dedicated channels for rights holders to report instances of infringement, including via our online reporting forms available through our intellectual property help centre. Reports can be submitted for a variety of content types, including individual posts, videos, advertisements and even entire profiles and pages. These reports are processed by our IP operations team, which is a global team of specially trained IP professionals who provide 24-7 coverage in multiple languages, including English and French.
If a rights holder's report is complete and valid, the reported content is promptly removed, often within a few hours. We also implement a comprehensive repeat infringer policy, under which we disable Facebook profiles and pages that repeatedly or blatantly post infringing content. Users who have their content removed in response to a report are notified of that removal at the time it occurs. These users are also provided information regarding the report, including the name and email address of the rights holder that submitted the report in case the parties wish to resolve the matter directly.
Third, we continue to invest heavily in state-of-the-art tools that allow us to protect copyright at scale across our platform, even if no rights holder has reported any specific instances of infringement.
We have developed our own content management tool, Rights Manager, to help rights holders protect their copyrights on Facebook. Participating rights holders can upload reference files, and when a match is found can decide what actions to take: blocking the video and thereby eliminating the need to continuously report matches as infringing, monitoring video metrics for the match, or reporting the video for removal.
For many years, we have also used Audible Magic, a third party service that maintains a database of audio content owned by content creators, to proactively detect content that contains the copyrighted material of third parties, including songs, movies and television shows. If a match is detected, that content is blocked, and the user that uploaded the content is notified of the block and given the opportunity to appeal if the user has the necessary rights.
In our transparency report released just a few weeks ago, we highlighted data covering the volume and nature of copyright reports we received, as well as the amount of content affected by those reports. During the first half of 2018, on Facebook and Instagram we took down nearly three million pieces of content based on nearly half a million copyright reports.
Lastly, Facebook believes that the copyright regime should represent everyone's interests. Regimes such as the one in Canada are flexible, and they promote innovation while protecting the intellectual property of rights holders.
Facebook hopes that the committee will continue to maintain the innovation-friendly regime of the Copyright Act, in order to promote the development of new content options and new ways for creators to launch their business and build a name for themselves.
Thank you again for the opportunity to appear before you. We would be pleased to take your questions.