Industry committee  One of the messages I tried to get across in the presentation is that there is a lot of convergence in the area of IP policy at the basic level. Between us and our trading partners, intellectual property frameworks, in terms of the basic building blocks—more or less the terms of a deal—are kind of common.

Industry committee  There certainly is a tension when you talk about setting up a right to exclude others from a market—essentially, if you constrain the concept of market to the market for your one little invention. There is tension between that and the idea of competition. So, to the extent that you have problems in a patent regime where maybe there are too many patents being granted, or maybe they're overly broad, or maybe they're being bundled in certain thickets, you can see a situation where they could create a transaction cost, they could create a friction in the market, create uncertainty that leads to litigation, or extensive negotiations between parties.

Industry committee  Absolutely. That's actually linked to the question that the chair asked me at the end of the presentation. Some of the things I would put in that bundle include that firms are feeling they need to develop defensive patent portfolios. We have talked to some firms in the ICT sector and the oil and gas sector.

Industry committee  I would probably want to think about this a little bit. Some of the discussion earlier in response to Mr. Braid's question would apply here; that's where I tried to identify some of the main IP stakeholder groups. Generally, what you see is that the main IP stakeholder groups have industry associations.

Industry committee  I could answer this by going back to some of the things that we hear. As I mentioned, the most widespread feedback we get from a variety of people is that copyright modernization is overdue. So that's been a priority, and that is currently the priority. The second thing is that Canada recently signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which relates to the enforcement of IP rights.

Industry committee  I think my colleagues will want to jump in on this one too, if that's okay. I could perhaps get started by offering that patent thickets, as a phenomenon, aren't novel to the current day and age. They are emerging as an issue in some sectors, and we're hearing from businesses that they are an issue.

Industry committee  Sure. To some extent, different parts of IP have different stakeholder groups, and then to some extent, they share them in common and span the groups. For example, the copyright debate is often framed in terms of the copyright rights-holder businesses, and those are some of the businesses that I mentioned earlier: the film industry, the publishing sector, the recording industry, photographers, etc.

Industry committee  Sure. Sylvain can perhaps...?

Industry committee  This is the practice of a firm developing multiple patents—it could be in the hundreds—surrounding a core technology. The example that's typically given is the cellphone, which can be the subject of a myriad of patents that cover various aspects of the technology. Some firms will use these as a defensive means of protecting their invention.

Industry committee  Sorry, you're reminding me how we're in a little world here and we get used to certain things, one of which is non-practising entities. This is a reference to firms that obtain a patent pool—a bunch of patents—and their business is to monetize those through lawsuits, through litigation, through settlements, rather than actually inventing or marketing the things that are covered by the patents.

Industry committee  Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here today. We spend our days where I work thinking about IP, thinking about how it affects the marketplace, and thinking about how it can be improved, so we really welcome the work of the committee in this area. I'd like to start by just talking about the IP framework, what it is, and why it's important.