Information & Ethics committee  Thanks very much. Good afternoon. 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. By way of background, I serve on the Privacy Commissioner of Canada's expert advisory committee and

Information & Ethics committee  I think they are largely interchangeable. I actually think “open government” has been the more popular term from other governments, and I think part of it just comes down to marketing, quite frankly. Some governments have seen the marketing value in being portrayed as open and ha

Information & Ethics committee  To unpack those few questions, I don't have an answer for why the decision was made to cancel the CAIRS database. I recall there was a fairly robust discussion at the time. I still think that, as was said at the time, it was a mistake, largely because the information is, of cours

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, I think at times there are. Depending on the type of data, there can be differences between the federal, provincial, and local levels. I'm thinking, for example, that it's a good opportunity to reference what exists right now with legal information. I would hope most peopl

Information & Ethics committee  You asked first about translation. I'm not an expert on the Official Languages Act who would know just how far or how broadly those implications would go. To highlight one of the examples I raised in terms of things like committee proceedings and the like, which are made availab

Information & Ethics committee  I would note that it would probably bear taking a closer look at how the European Union as a whole is addressing some of these issues. There have been some open data initiatives at the EU level, and the EU is obviously more than just bilingual. They're dealing with large numbers

Information & Ethics committee  What I've seen at some UN organizations is a gradual shift towards greater openness of documents that previously were either closed or fee-based. I think, for example, of the ITU, the International Telecommunication Union, the leading UN body dealing with telecom-related matters.

Information & Ethics committee  That's a good question, and it raises a number of issues. The starting position of some countries--the United States is the best known for us--is that copyright doesn't attach to these documents, full stop. I think many of the examples we heard about unleashing the economic valu

Information & Ethics committee  I don't think it's going to take a new bureaucracy; we just have make some choices. There are a number of different creative commons licences. A number of the countries that have looked at this issue have come to the conclusion that there is no creative commons licence ideally su

Information & Ethics committee  Where I quote something on my blog or in an article, I'm often going to rely on an exception within the Copyright Act. Fair dealing would give me the right to use works, whether government documents or otherwise, for research purposes, criticism purposes, news reviews, or whateve

Information & Ethics committee  It was granted in that case, and, as I say, in most instances it is granted. There are two problems. One is with instances in which it's not granted, because it feels like a misuse of copyright. As well, from a cost and policy perspective, layering those costs onto Canadian publi

Information & Ethics committee  Under the current regime, from a pure copyright perspective, there's no real difference between the crown and Margaret Atwood. It's the same. The amount that someone may use of those documents is going to depend on whether they qualify under the fair dealing exception. Fair deali

Information & Ethics committee  The Auditor General took the position that they couldn't even take a chapter. I think they had a reasonable argument that they could have taken a chapter under fair dealing.

Information & Ethics committee  I don't think it necessarily would affect crown corporations. If we use the U.S. model and we say we're trying to create an open licence on this, or a freer licence, then we're taking the position that anything that government itself produces, as well as works that it commission

Information & Ethics committee  Of course not, and I'm glad you raised the question. It's important to distinguish between works that are commissioned and created internally and works that are published and made available. The notion of putting an open licence on government works is not saying that everything