Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, members of the committee. My name is David Fewer. I'm the director of CIPPIC, which is the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the centre for law, technology and society at the University of Ottawa. We

Industry committee  We're always skeptical about claims that Canada is unique or is at the top of the charts in accessing illegal content. I always look at the source. I'm sorry, but I haven't seen the report that Mr. Smith brought to your attention.

Industry committee  Other times when we have done that, we've found that things aren't always what the report claims. In looking at piracy in general, our take is that the best way to address piracy issues is with a good marketplace framework: a regulatory environment that allows services to come

Industry committee  That's a good question. The law always lags behind technological developments. It's just a feature and it's probably right. We wouldn't want to be sprinting ahead in trying to constrain or direct innovation in a particular way. We want the marketplace to react as it will and we w

Industry committee  Our position is that the Federal Court is the place for copyright to be enforced—the Federal Court or the provincial courts. We're highly skeptical of the efficacy and the “strategic-ness”, let's call it, of any kind of site-blocking mechanism to really address these kinds of iss

Industry committee  When you say, “no recourse”, I think the challenge is jurisdictional issues. Is that what's being implied? That these places are in other jurisdictions...? It's true that they're in other jurisdictions, but the truth is that those other jurisdictions have copyright laws as well.

Industry committee  Is it absolutely clear? I mean, the court has very broad remedial discretion under the Copyright Act. Considering their injunctive powers under equitable remedies, they have very broad powers. I would like to see the failure of these provisions before we go in and say that they'r

Industry committee  I'd echo those comments as well. Speed and efficiency were a huge concern with the Copyright Board. One thing that I would raise that runs slightly contrary to that is the inability of interveners to participate before the Copyright Board. We found it a problem. Our organization

Industry committee  That's exactly it. We've acted for parties who were properly participants before the Copyright Board as well. Their objective was to be interveners, to bring in a nuanced perspective, a unique perspective different from that of the other participants before the board, but they w

Industry committee  With the interrogatories, you're either all in or you're out.

Industry committee  They were in long enough to make their point, and then they had to get out, because these organizations are not funded to be battlers before the Copyright Board. Nonetheless, they had valid perspectives, important things to say. They wanted to say things that the board was not go

Industry committee  I beg your pardon. What a—?

Industry committee  We've had a little bit of judicial interpretation of the provisions, one of which was absolutely horrific, where a court, a lower-level court, thankfully, said that merely getting content that is behind a paywall for a third party—say John is a subscriber and I ask John to shoot

Industry committee  Yes, I will share those. I'll put my cards on the table. I have constitutional concerns with the anti-circumvention provisions. I've written about this for 25 years. Copyright attaches to expression. It's built into the law. You don't get a copyright on ideas. You get a copyrig

Industry committee  We've seen in the United States, with the notice and take down system, which was kind of the first of these sorts of systems in the United States, that consequences, basically penalties, lie for being reckless or knowingly misusing the system. We don't have that in Canada. My org