Industry committee  I think it's a fair system. To the point that Kevin raised, we're dealing with these issues at scale—again, 400 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute—and as a result it's a massive system that needs to be dealt with on an automated basis at the front end. That said, once you've gone through an appeals process, there are opportunities to interact with individuals, especially through the appeals, so please, as I said, I invite you to put them in touch, because I'd like to understand the specifics that happened here.

Industry committee  We're on a purely revenue-sharing basis. Essentially there's a proportional share that happens between the creator and the platform, so we're receiving only a proportion of what they are receiving. It isn't on a per-view basis, because not every video will have an ad shown against it, and depending on the specifics of where their ad is being seen—it also works through an auction system—there is a high degree of variability in the actual rate they'll see.

Industry committee  In some instances, that does happen. It depends on what policy the rights holder has chosen to enact and how they've selected to do so.

Industry committee  Well, number one, I would be reticent to say any individual example is a clear case of fair dealing, because that would be a case-by-case instance. For example, it's theoretically possible that a react video may use a sizeable portion of the original content. As a consequence, it may not actually be an example of fair dealing.

Industry committee  Again, it is difficult to comment on a specific example. I am a bit surprised by the outcome, simply because to get to that, you have to go through a formal counter-notice whereby you are provided the opportunity to formally submit a response saying that the takedown request is incorrect, at which point the default goes to the claimant and it would be restored without the necessity of engaging in a lawsuit.

Industry committee  In terms of the assumption that was being made because a match was being made, that's correct.

Industry committee  I would like to just quickly comment on that. You actually highlight a challenge that we have when we implement systems like this. They certainly go well above and beyond our minimum requirements under United States, European or even Canadian copyright law. We have a court challenge in terms of balancing those rights.

Industry committee  I'll start. Actually, only larger companies can, because it is an extraordinarily powerful tool. It requires quite a bit of proactive management. We actually have 9,000 Content ID partners. Generally these are larger entities that have large libraries of content that require this kind of protection, and they also have the dedicated resources to manage it properly, especially because you can control the way the system manages for each individual territory in a very nuanced kind of way.

Industry committee  Essentially, no, effectively because fair dealing is a contextual test that requires analysis on each individual case. On any automated system, no matter how good the algorithm, no matter how sophisticated the machine learning that we're applying—and we are doing that—basically, we'll never be able to ascertain that.

Industry committee  I wouldn't agree with that. Number one, it's worth noting that on the music side, we're actually a licence platform. We have thousands of licence agreements with collectives, publishers and labels worldwide. They feed what we call “YouTube main”, the general online video platform, as well as some of the specific music-related services we have, such as Google Play Music or YouTube Music.

Industry committee  No.

Industry committee  Essentially, we're based on a partnership model. I'll use the YouTube platform as an example, where essentially there's a clear revenue split. The individual channel owner—basically the creator—receives very detailed analytics around the specific performance of the individual video they posted, including where the revenue with respect to the advertising comes from and how that flows to them.

Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. We appreciate the opportunity to participate in your review. Google has over 1,000 employees across four offices in Canada, including over 600 engineers working on products used by billions of people worldwide, and ads and cloud teams helping Canadian businesses make the most of digital technology.