Professor Geist and I actually agree on the broad strokes, but when it comes down to interpretation, we don't always come to the same conclusion.
I agree that there's a fine and a difficult line that the government needs to draw between balancing the need to prevent harm from coming to Canadians and the need to let business run in a less fettered manner and in a manner less expensive to police. However, I still believe very strongly that the two examples Professor Geist uses—one in which there's a case of an exploding battery and the other one in which there's a case of Canadian consumers who are buying illegal goods—are both serious. I don't see one as more serious.
In fact, there was a situation just a while back in which computer batteries were catching fire. In that particular case, the large manufacturers such as Dell and Apple had been purchasing their batteries from reputable, non-counterfeit sources such as Sony, and the net result was that all the consumers who had bought computers with faulty batteries were sent new batteries, and there were remedies. I would put it that the line between that and the fact that we protect a company that has a name like “Sony”, which is a big international company in the entertainment business—Theirs should not be dealt with differently than a little battery that's made by a small company with no name and is counterfeit. I think it's all part of the same issue.
And it's a larger issue. It's really an issue of whether we want to live in a society in which we encourage people to save money at the expense of having a framework that's fair or in a society in which we don't. If you look at it from a point of view of fairness, I don't think there's a big difference between the exploding battery and people ripping off DVD movies.