Information & Ethics committee  Former industry minister John Manley appeared before the Bill C-32 committee yesterday, and I believe that in talking about the bill, he said, “The perfect is the enemy of the good”. I think that applies here. The notion that we have to jump from zero to 300,000 on day one and

Information & Ethics committee  I have to admit that I like a lot of what Mr. Macmillan just had to say. I think it starts from a presumption that it's open, full stop. Once you start from the presumption that access to our democratic institutions is going to be open, everything follows from there. We've seen

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, sure. Australia and, increasingly, the U.K. are examples of countries that have crown copyright and have not amended the law to eliminate crown copyright. Instead they are moving toward a licensed approach whereby they would use an open licence associated with crown copyrigh

Information & Ethics committee  Right. We should be clear about what that is. I think it was one of the first times someone tried to do it. I launched an access to information request for data on all requests that government had received on crown copyright within one government year. By my calculation, about 95

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

Information & Ethics committee  I think that's right. I think there may be instances in which we'd be dealing with information that is disclosed, say, through the access to information office. That would similarly qualify as information in the public sphere, but of course there are exceptions for some of the ki

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  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  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