That highlights another area of IP abuse, in this case really copyright abuse. As many of you may remember, the 2012 copyright reforms, which will be the subject of much discussion with the copyright review that starts later this year, included a fairly innovative approach known as “notice and notice” in terms of trying to find a mechanism to ensure that rights holders had a mechanism to address allegations of infringement online while at the same time trying to safeguard the privacy and free speech interests of Internet users, trying to find a way to balance. While in places like the United States we've seen a takedown system that is often referred to as a “shoot first and aim later” approach, where often legitimate content is taken down without any court oversight, our approach instead involves Internet service providers like Rogers and Bell and others. Rights holders who believe their copyright has been infringed can send a notification to the ISP, who is obligated to forward that notification along to their subscriber, but not to disclose the identity of the subscriber.
Two things have emerged in the last number of years since that took place that have been problematic. One, people are using that system to send demand notices to settle. That's something that was never envisioned. What it means is that you get literally thousands, in some instances hundreds of thousands, of Canadians who receive notifications, don't know much about copyright, get immediately really scared about the notice, and pay when there is no obligation to do so.
The system was never designed...or it was not even thought that it would function in this fashion. Part of the problem was that the then government, the Conservative government, was supposed to introduce regulations as part of this. Those regulations never came. We simply put the law into place.
There is an easy fix. It's the regulations that are missing that would preclude or prohibit the ability to include those kinds of settlement demands in the notices. That was never really envisioned as part of the system.
The other problem that's come up, which you highlighted in the Rogers case, is that we've started to see, in a sense, IP trolls try to identify the individuals themselves, and using the court system, in a sense, to try to force ISPs to disclose the identity of their subscribers. They are doing this en masse, affecting thousands of people. Again, it's something that I don't think was ever envisioned. Indeed, in the off-loading of this, what it means is that there are major costs that are ultimately now being borne by subscribers themselves, because the ISPs are being forced to bear this, and they are undoubtedly passing it along to their customers.