Industry committee  All right. Those provided three more examples. There are in the United States a number of companies that have emerged based on open government data. So they've used government data that might be made available in open format, they've added their own value-add, and have become viable commercial companies.

Industry committee  You may recall what happened when Amazon tried to enter the Canadian marketplace. It functions as amazon.ca, and it's largely run through the post office. Owing to restrictions on the requirement for booksellers to be Canadian owned, it couldn't function in this country the way it functions in other jurisdictions.

Industry committee  Thanks very much. Good afternoon. As you heard, my name is Michael Geist. I'm a law professor at the University of Ottawa, where I hold the Canada research chair in Internet and e-commerce law. I appear before the committee today in my personal capacity, representing only my own views.

International Trade committee  I think you're right. Especially in the copyright area, a change in technology represents a real challenge, but I think there are a couple of ways that you deal with that. One is that there is a continual revisiting of these issues, and Bill C-32, which your government has introduced, contains a requirement that we take a look at the law every five years.

International Trade committee  Thank you for the question. Let me deal with each of those, because you have in a sense highlighted two of the most important ones in terms of statutory damages and digital locks. On statutory damages, I think there's increasing concern among many individual Canadians that cases of non-commercial infringement....

International Trade committee  Potentially there could be, yes. If you were to see statutory damages in the context of digital locks, then yes, the mere act of trying to circumvent, if we were to have those kinds of provisions, could lead to very significant penalties. In the CETA context, though, I guess my view is that we're moving in a direction to provide some legal protection for digital locks.

International Trade committee  Yes, I'll jump right in. Where we're debating issues about market access and tariffs, I think that sounds a lot like a trade agreement, and that's where some of these trade offsets we're hearing about from the other couple of witnesses come into play. What I think is important to recognize within the copyright-related provisions is that we're not talking about market access.

International Trade committee  Thanks. Good morning. My name is Michael Geist. I'm a law professor at the University of Ottawa, where I hold the Canada research chair on Internet and e-commerce law. I've been active on copyright and intellectual property issues for many years. Last year, I edited the largest academic study to date on Bill C-32, the current copyright bill, with peer-reviewed contributions from 20 leading Canadian experts.

International Trade committee  Sure. That's no problem.

International Trade committee  So there were two global concerns with the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement. First, the secrecy associated with the negotiations led to widespread concern about negotiating an intellectual property agreement outside the conventional international forum of the World Intellectual Property Organization and with a level of secrecy normally accorded to military documents.

Bill C-32 (40th Parliament, 3rd Session) committee  I'll take the opportunity to respond to Mr. Sookman's earlier comments in which he suggested I'm advocating all sorts of free copying. I hope you'll agree that over the last couple of hours that's not what you've heard. I'm calling for a balanced approach to copyright, not one in which wild, uncompensated copying is taking place.

Bill C-32 (40th Parliament, 3rd Session) committee  Sure. The notion of free dealing is one that is foreign to our copyright law, and indeed it's foreign to most copyright laws that I'm aware of. It is the notion that someone has the unfettered right to copy without any sort of compensation. A rights holder can choose to make their work available in that fashion, but you wouldn't typically find that in a copyright law.

Bill C-32 (40th Parliament, 3rd Session) committee  I think there's a lot of attractiveness to the concept of a levy. I think the problem to date has been that many of the proposals, with all respect, haven't addressed a lot of the complications that arise in the context of a levy. There are problems of marketplace distortion in that you're going to have consumers buying some of those same products outside the country.

Bill C-32 (40th Parliament, 3rd Session) committee  I think that the enablement provision is helpful in that regard. I don't have a problem with it. I think it needs to ensure that we don't have unintended consequences. At the same time, if those are tools that can help in terms of targeting some of the bad actors, I think that's just fine.

Bill C-32 (40th Parliament, 3rd Session) committee  The quick answer raises at least two points. First, statutory damages are relatively rare. Most countries don't have them. We're generally one of the exceptions rather than the rule. I think this notion that $5,000 is going to be viewed by the average Canadian as a licence to steal is completely out of touch with reality.