That's a really interesting question. I think that especially in the digital environment this touches on a range of different issues, including on the digital trade chapter and on copyright.
On copyright, I would say that the work we did back in 2007 leading up to the Copyright Modernization Act in 2012, as well as the copyright review that was conducted extensively by the industry committee last year and into that period, gives us pretty good sense of where Canada stands. I actually think Canada has been pretty innovative when it comes to some of our copyright rules. They meet international standards, but at the same time many of them have been fairly forward-looking.
The issue around term extension is an interesting one, because it's bipartisan, in the sense that we had successive Conservative governments and, later, Liberal governments that all rejected the notion of extending the term of copyright. The Canadian position was that we needed to meet the minimum international standard that's established through something known as the Berne Convention. This is something that we do.
The U.S. has long pressured us to extend the term of copyright. That extension in the United States is often referred to as the Mickey Mouse term extension, because Disney actively pressured for that term extension to keep Mickey out of the public domain. We took a look at that issue in Canada and said that we wanted to ensure that our artists are well compensated, and we also wanted to ensure that consumers don't overpay. We wanted to ensure that there are appropriate levels of access in trying to strike that balance. Not extending the term of copyright was how we tried to do that.
I can't put myself into the negotiating room to know why it was that after decades of saying no to term extension we finally agreed to it in this agreement. What I do know is that the best way to try to at least salvage a difficult and I think bad situation with respect to term extension is to take advantage of this transition period that the government did negotiate.
At least with respect to some kind of registration requirement, I think it offers up the prospect that for a small number of works, for those works where there are rights holders who say they want to be competitive and want to ensure that they have as long a period of time as possible for protection, they'll make that registration. They'll get the extra 20 years, but for an enormous amount of Canadian heritage, for other works, those will enter into the public domain in accordance with the international standard.
As for what we ought to be doing, I think this committee ought to leave things alone in terms of where we are right now and recommend the registration process in keeping with what the industry committee said in the copyright review. We need to spend the next 30 months developing a registration process, which, much like some of the other issues we dealt with many years ago, other countries may look to and say that Canada provides a good example of how to strike that appropriate balance.