This is a big point for us, in that the TPMs protected by the Copyright Act are empowering people—both federally and provincially, we feel—to circumvent other Canadian law. Within the Competition Act, there are regulations regarding abuse by dominant players that is enforced by technical protection measures. We cannot circumvent that as we have no way to be competitive, even with adversarial competition, because the TPMs provide such a hard lockout to doing it that we have no way to be the David against the Goliath at the federal level with respect to copyright law.
Provincially we have, in Alberta and Saskatchewan, the agriculture dealers implement act, which states that an OEM cannot enforce so-called brand purity on equipment dealers to force them to represent only one brand. The act allows for dealers to represent a multitude of brands that are all aftermarket in that case, and a large number of those would be Canadian brands.
The use of TPMs in this case circumvents the provincial acts by creating a way for them to create a technical barrier to interoperability so that even if the dealers could sell onto those brand platforms, they've technically traded the brand purity that has been prevented from being put directly into dealer contracts.