Human Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. My name is Jason Kee. I'm the director of policy and legal affairs with the Entertainment Software Association of Canada. We're the industry association representing companies in Canada that develop, publish, and distribute video and computer games across a

Industry committee  Certainly there are always challenges, and over the course of the past year there have certainly been some fairly high profile data breaches. The highest structured profile was Sony, who runs the PlayStation Network, which basically had been hacked. Someone broke in and apparentl

Industry committee  As we alluded to before, offering concrete suggestions is challenging. Also, at the end of the day, we represent video game makers, and while we encourage and basically urge the deployment of broadband into rural areas, the specific means of doing that is something that, frankly,

Industry committee  Certainly, and it's actually a very complex question. The key way that it works is that instead of actually taking your game and basically printing it onto plastic discs that you then give to retailers, so that you are basically putting them into a box and selling them, the gam

Industry committee  By and large, it actually works fairly well. One of the reasons that it works fairly well for us is that payment providers like PayPal, and for Apple for its App Store, and RIM for its App World, frankly, make it work a lot more easily for us. To their credit, especially Apple an

Industry committee  Certainly, it's a great question. I would say that first and foremost, the entertainment software industry is a great example of a domestic Canadian industry that has always been global in view and scope. We haven't been focused on developing content for our domestic market, but

Industry committee  What we have is a wide variety of digital distribution models. I touched on this when we were discussing the different kinds of mobile platforms. Some are open, so it's whatever you want, and some are closed. Closed platforms rely on digital locks to function. With digital locks,

Industry committee  It's certainly not a hindrance. The challenge is that we are an industry that tends to cluster, and we tend to cluster in urban areas. There are a number of reasons for that, not the least of which is access to high-speed infrastructure. That is critical. But we also have very go

Industry committee  My answer to that is very brief. Is it just about a coherent approach? No. It's something that we strongly encourage and support, and we support the development of plans to assist with that. To be honest, I think first and foremost we need to start thinking about a coherent digi

Industry committee  That's generally the case. That's right.

Industry committee  It's primarily to protect the content itself. The biggest challenge we have when people discuss tying the notion of circumvention to infringement—because the issue is that we prohibit circumvention of these digital locks, these TPMs—is that from an enforcement perspective, which

Industry committee  Precisely. Actually, in the case of games you can retrieve it from the cloud on the device that it will play on. If you buy a game for a PlayStation, it won't work on a Xbox because it's a different platform.

Industry committee  That's right. That's exactly right. In fact, actually, if you buy the next Xbox, the new one, for example, you can actually just transfer everything, transfer your account, onto the new device and just pull all the content down again. And so it doesn't require you to buy the cont

Industry committee  It is significant. It does vary from platform to platform, but it's been growing year over year. The main problem that we have, particularly in Canada, is that because we haven't had a prohibition on these hacking devices, these circumvention devices, we've actually become a majo

Industry committee  Absolutely. It relates, actually, to what Darrell was just saying. The video game industry has always been a global industry. We have never made content that we sold purely domestically. The Canadian market is not big enough to sustain our industry. So we actually always sell ove