Industry committee  Good afternoon. My name is Ariel Katz. I'm a law professor at the University of Toronto, where I hold the innovation chair in electronic commerce. I am very grateful for the opportunity to appear before you this afternoon. In my comments today, I would like to focus on dispelli

Industry committee  Okay. There are 46,000 full-time academic authors employed by Canadian universities, and Access Copyright has only 12,000 writer members. U of T alone has more writer members than Access Copyright. In other words, the vast majority of works that you use in universities are not

Industry committee  It has very little to do with copyright and very little to do with fair dealing.

Industry committee  South Africa basically has followed something that the United States and Israel have been doing for many years. I argue that it has also been the law in Canada for many years, even though we don't really know that this is the law. We don't have such magic words in the fair dealin

Industry committee  Are you asking about my recommendations?

Industry committee  I would try to scale down the act by getting back to first principles. Focus on defining certain rights that are narrow in scope. Identify, for example, that if you're an author, somebody cannot make an identical or near-identical copy of your book and sell it. That's easy and m

Industry committee  Yes.

Industry committee  The criteria introduced in the bill are, by and large, a good idea. I have a problem with the public interest criterion, because that could mean anything. The main criterion there, that the tariffs be set to try to imitate as far as possible what would have been charged in a com

Industry committee  I'm concerned about what's going to be put into the public interest.

Industry committee  Some of the most innovative countries, such as the United States, have the open and flexible fair use principle that Mr. Sookman is strongly opposed to. Also, they don't have site blocking, which he advocates for. I think you should be aware of that.

Industry committee  Yes. When you think of whether site blocking is effective, you have to think, effective in what? One question is whether it's effective in blocking those sites. It might be, even though people can work around that. That's one type of effectiveness. However, if the question is whe

Industry committee  If you want to stop piracy, the question is, what causes piracy? As I wrote in my report with respect to the CRTC, and I blogged about it, we don't have a piracy problem; we have a competition problem. We have a highly concentrated telecom market. We have incumbents that control

Industry committee  That's exactly the study—

Industry committee  That's exactly the study I was referring to.

Industry committee  Do you mean decided cases?