Madam Speaker, my colleague from Cape Breton—Canso has put his finger right on it.
School boards, universities and libraries around the country think in terms of what portion of their budget they ought to allocate to the rights of creators and artists. We call those licensing agreements for legal purposes and those licensing agreements must carry a particular value. They permit anybody in that educational library or information dissemination industry to share that creation and, when they do, they think in terms of the obvious limits. They constantly upgrade their product.
We can see that it would be unrealistic, let us say a generation ago, to buy a textbook, seal it in Saran wrap or some such other thing, give it to someone and say, “I give it only to you. Once you have taken off that wrap, then it belongs to you. You cannot give it to anybody else. If you share your book with another student, the book self-immolates, it burns”.
That is essentially what we are asking these digital locks to do, which is to prevent somebody from actually opening that book. When people open it, they will actually read it and consume it. Whether the individual is standing or sitting beside them as they read this book or whether we send it to them and say that they can borrow the book for a week, it is the same concept.
As my colleague from Cape Breton—Canso has so rightly pointed out, we may need to revisit some of these licensing agreements as the infrastructure for the digital lock problem from the point of view of educational institutions.