Mr. Chair and honourable members, on behalf of the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada, thank you for the invitation to appear as part of INDU's study.
IPIC is the professional association of lawyers and patent and trademark agents practising in all areas of intellectual property. My name is Catherine—or Cat—Lovrics, and I am here as the chair of IPIC’s copyright committee and our subcommittee on the right to repair.
IPIC recognizes that the 2021 mandate letters reflect the policy objective of implementing a right to repair to extend the life of home appliances and amending the Copyright Act to allow for the repair of digital devices and systems, a pursuit that led honourable member Wilson Miao to table Bill C-244.
We are pleased to hear the openness to amend the bill, including from MP Wilson Miao himself. IPIC’s written submissions will follow and include specific proposed amendments to the bill for you to consider, which are aimed at helping the government achieve its objectives.
To that end, our subcommittee focused our efforts on the specific wording of Bill C-244, considering the entire scheme of the Copyright Act, a comparison with approaches of our trading partners, as well as compliance with Canada’s treaty obligations. I will provide some highlights today.
From a copyright perspective, the right to repair concerns exceptions that permit technological protection measures—or TPMs—to be circumvented. Since 1997, Canada has recognized that adequate legal protections for TPMs are indispensable to protecting copyright. Since then, reliance on TPMs has become integral—