Thank you for this opportunity to present before the committee regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. I'm Steve Anderson, the executive director of OpenMedia.ca.
Founded in 2008, OpenMedia.ca is a community-based, award-winning civic engagement organization working to safeguard the open Internet. We work to bring citizens' and innovators' voices into the digital policy-making process.
OpenMedia is probably best known for our stop the meter campaign that engaged over half a million Canadians to stop meter billing in Canada focused on telecommunications prices. It was the largest online campaign in Canadian history.
In addition to our civic engagement work, we also regularly participate in policy processes and produce public policy reports and recommendations. Many of our recommendations, in particular regarding telecommunications, have now thankfully been adopted as official government policy.
One of our top concerns at the moment is the IP chapter in the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, specifically copyright within the IP chapter.
We're working with hundreds of thousands of people in our own trans-Pacific network of public interest groups and web businesses to push for and encourage a balanced copyright provision in the TPP. We are working, as I said, in our own crowdsource process to develop copyright rules that we feel are more befitting of the 21st century.
Our concern with the TPP is focused on the intellectual property chapter, as I mentioned, and its potential limitations on free expression online, commerce, and access to knowledge.
Over 135,000 people have signed on to a campaign that we've run reflecting these same concerns. These concerns are echoed by Canadians and I have, in a sense, crowdsourced this presentation for you today. I asked Canadians online over the last week to let me know what they think I should say, and I did my best to incorporate their input into this presentation. Throughout the presentation, I'll mention a few direct comments that people sent in to me.
The Canadians I heard from were broadly critical of the TPP and their concerns fell roughly into three main categories: the restriction and even censorship of expression in commerce; concerns about the TPP's implications for personal privacy; and thirdly, what many deem as the secretive, closed, and undemocratic TPP negotiating process.
Starting with the first concern—the implications on expression in commerce—Canada took 10 years, as I'm sure many of you know, to pass our copyright policies in Bill C-11. When I attended a TPP negotiating round in Auckland, I asked our own TPP chief negotiator if she would commit to uploading our copyright law and not overriding it through the TPP process. She refused to make that commitment.
Generally, I don't think Bill C-11 is exactly how I would have written it, but I think it's a reasonable compromise. But if we get into some of the specifics of the TPP that have been unfortunately revealed through leaked documents, I think we can start with digital locks or technological protection mechanisms.
The U.S. proposal in the TPP would increase the penalties for circumvention and restrict the ability for Canada to create new digital lock exceptions.
On the issue of digital locks, a woman online, named Monica, wrote into our process, and I want to convey this to you today. She said that as part of the special needs community, she wants to be able to continue sharing resources with others without fear of sanctions. As a community, they are often isolated, and without the Internet, they would be even more so. So the TPP threatens to limit the flexibility and exceptions on copyright that those with disabilities depend upon in their use of technology.
According to leaked documents, the TPP would also remove our relatively fair, I would say, notice system for dealing with those accused of copyright infringement. Instead, they would create new, costly liabilities for online service providers and ISPs. This increased cost for Internet service providers will result in Canadian consumers paying more for telecom services. As I'm sure you're aware, we pay some of the highest prices in the industrialized world for telecom services, and increasing fees is the last thing Canadians need right now.
The new business costs could knock independent Internet service providers—the smaller players—out of business and remove choice from the telecom marketplace. The liability costs could also add a barrier to entry for online entrepreneurs that are increasingly critical to our economy.
In short, if this U.S.-backed TPP-ISP liability proposal is adopted, it would mark a major step back for the government's commitment to lower telecom prices and improve choices.
Just to make this a little more concrete, on a daily basis countless photographs and other content are shared through new innovative services that are fundamental to our thriving economy. These services are also threatened by these new liabilities and regulations proposed in the TPP. One example of one online service provider is Vancouver-based HootSuite, which in August raised over $165 million from investors, marking the largest private placement for a privately held tech company in Canada. Another example is Ontario-based e-commerce platform Shopify, which passed the $1 billion evaluation mark this December; and then let's not forget Toronto-based Tucows Inc., which is the world's largest publicly traded domain name registrar.
These companies are threatened by this new liability that will be in the TPP, if it goes through as the U.S. is hoping it will. Do we really want to threaten to burden these budding businesses with new costs and regulations? Do we want to create a new cost that prevents the next HootSuite or Shopify from starting in the first place? Furthermore, as everything from our cars to our fridges are connected to the Internet, these proposed liabilities and costs fundamentally threaten to create red tape for a dizzying array of services. The new liabilities could be particularly damaging to the emerging Internet-fuelled sharing economy that is currently driving value across a range of sectors.
According to the Information Technology Association of Canada, the national Internet economy accounted for 3% of Canada's gross domestic product in 2010, compared to an average of 4.7% in the United States. It's estimated that ratio will become more out of balance if we don't take action to invest in our digital economy. We simply cannot afford to add new red tape and costly regulations to online businesses and commerce, while increasing telecom costs for Canadians.
Increasing ISP liabilities is also a threat to individual expression online. According to IP experts the TPP proposals could result in ISPs taking down and even blocking content based on accusations. In short, the TPP represents a regime that could amount to widespread Internet censorship. One commentator online had this to say on the topic:
Censorship of any kind is undemocratic. It has no business in our society and we should actively DISTANCE ourselves from such heavy-handed policies.
Here is the fundamental point. There's no way that increasing online liabilities as proposed in the TPP is in the national interest of Canada. Old media conglomerates in Hollywood have no problem pushing for policies that will hold back the Canadian economy or free expression, but legislators surely should.
Beyond new service liabilities, there's also concern about the TPP criminalizing common activities that involve small-scale and often accidental copyright infringement, such as sharing a recipe online. According to intellectual property experts and Professor Sean Flynn, the U.S. TPP proposal would severely increase penalties for copyright infringement even when done without commercial intent. He notes that we could even be looking at controversial copyright cases in the U.S. where teenagers and their mothers have been required to pay big record companies hundreds of thousands of dollars for copying music for personal use.
Canadian copyright law now includes an important distinction with respect to statutory damages as it features a cap of $5,000 for non-commercial infringement.
As it stands, we already have copyright trolls trying to use copyright litigation as a business model. Under the TPP, damages could skyrocket. We could see many more of those court cases and we could see Canadians much more timid and fearful online.