I think you're right. Especially in the copyright area, a change in technology represents a real challenge, but I think there are a couple of ways that you deal with that. One is that there is a continual revisiting of these issues, and Bill C-32, which your government has introduced, contains a requirement that we take a look at the law every five years. I think that's a good approach--recognizing that.
Now, the particular issue around digital locks that we're talking about involves treaties negotiated in the 1990s that attempted to be forward-looking. While we can debate whether they truly were forward-looking, the standards they set are the standards that have been adopted still today—even recently, in many other countries, among some of our other trading partners. I'm not saying we don't need to move forward with those rules; I'm saying that the kind of general outline they provide is one that's designed to stay current. I think we need to retain those flexibilities in the law.
I'd also just quickly note that we shouldn't underestimate the ability of copyright law, in its basic principles, to deal with some of these issues. I'll give you an example. The current bill provides a specific provision to deal with what are called enabler sites, sites that are designed to deal with clear pirate websites. Everybody says, well, of course we need to be able to deal with that.
Last year, three weeks before the bill was introduced, 26 record labels secretly filed a massive lawsuit against the largest known alleged pirate site in Canada, a site called isoHunt. They used existing Canadian copyright law. They're looking for millions of dollars in damages, they're looking for a full shutdown of the site, and they're using the law today.
The lawsuit suggests that all these claims that they are powerless and that we need reforms mistake a little bit where we really stand, because in fact there is the ability to use, in many instances, basic copyright principles that have been in place for decades to deal with some of these issues. It's in a sense old wine in new bottles, but it can still effectively apply.