Canadian Heritage committee  No. In many ways, some of the things that we see coming out of WIPO are actually past their best due date. I don't think they have worked well. That said, I also recognize that there is pressure to do it. We did sign it. That doesn't obligate us to do anything further, but the pr

Canadian Heritage committee  On the issue of skills—we had a chance to talk about it earlier—I'm in complete agreement. Any digital strategy has to include a skills component and to recognize that the digital divide is both one involving access—the sense of being able to access the network—but also involving

Canadian Heritage committee  No, it's used successfully right here. The way notice and notice has worked is that it's actually been an informal agreement among ISPs and rights holders in Canada for the last number of years. I get e-mails fairly regularly from people who have received one of these notificat

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes. Things seem to leak. I don't know who it was; it was an anonymous source, but someone provided it to me. I will tell you that this would fundamentally reshape not just copyright, but patent and trademark as well. In many ways what the Europeans are demanding is that Canada

Canadian Heritage committee  First, my understanding is that Amazon is the second-biggest online seller. I think Chapters/Indigo is still number one. If you were to ask Canadians who have purchased from Amazon.ca whether they know if Amazon has a distribution arm in the country, I don't think there's practic

Canadian Heritage committee  That's a fair point. There may be others who do it. At this stage, I guess I would ask what we are afraid of exactly. I think there are positives and there are negatives with respect to the big sellers, including the Chapters/Indigo type. I hear from many smaller publishers and

Canadian Heritage committee  Webkinz is still here, but Club Penguin was bought out.

Canadian Heritage committee  Just to clarify, in terms of BitTorrent being a great success, I was actually saying that CBC was a great success for using BitTorrent, although clearly BitTorrent is a very popular protocol and is successful in the sense that a lot of people use it, although some people understa

Canadian Heritage committee  I'll deal with the second part first, the issue of government. For a number of years the perception of government in the online environment was this e-government, this notion of delivering government services online. That is a very good thing. In fact, Canada was seen as being v

Canadian Heritage committee  I had a chance to write a column and then do a debate on it on the CBC radio show Q. I think there is a role to play for Canadian regulations that support Canadian authors and support Canadian publishers. Indeed, there is scarcely a book published anywhere in this country that do

Canadian Heritage committee  Thanks. Those are great questions. I'm glad you raised the issue of CIRA and the “dot.ca” domain name. I spent six years on that board. I think it's a well-run, terrific organization. There are more than one million dot.ca domain names registered. I think we ought to recogniz

Canadian Heritage committee  I touched on, obviously, the specifics. If we were to think about it from a principle basis, I would say that, one, it needs to be forward-looking. We need to recognize that some proposals that have been put on the table, and are very strongly advocated for, come out of the 1990s

Canadian Heritage committee  It's obvious that it is a challenge to compete with “free”, but I don't think we should be of the view that just because something is available for free, no market can develop. For instance, iTunes has sold well over a billion songs, and all of those songs are freely available on

Canadian Heritage committee  There you go. The truth is that you can compete with free if you provide value. One of the really exciting things about the Internet is that we're seeing innovators coming up with all kinds of different ways where they can add value and entice the customer to pay.

Canadian Heritage committee  Let me just respond, and if I have the time later on, perhaps I'll get to the author issue, because I think it's an important one as well. I agree that there needs to be compensation. I don't necessarily agree that it means there needs to be an iPod levy, though. I think those t