International Trade committee  The issue boils down to technical evolution. We're moving away from simple and robust means of interconnection and, without adding significant functionality, adding a lot of technical complexity. In the same way that Apple has unique ways of locking out third party participatio

International Trade committee  In the case of a simple windrower like a swather, where you're just cutting the crop and laying it down, it's pretty straightforward to reverse engineer or design a parallel system. In the case of a combine, where there's so much integration between what the head does and the res

International Trade committee  From my desk, as the engineering guy who's responsible for making those adaptations, I don't want to go to jail doing it. For peace of mind, at the minimum is the inclusion of the exemptions that our American counterparts enjoy and bringing that to our legislation on copyright, b

International Trade committee  Yes and no. The interoperability aspect with automotive aftermarket is quite a bit different, because we're not asking to operate our stereo system from the seat controls or some weird thing or whatever to make stuff do the feature we want. We're asking for the same functionalit

International Trade committee  The shortcoming is that there was a lack of possibility, as I understood it. Again, we're not into the details of the investigation that they made. We fed in the information and our concerns, but it was expressed to us that there was a lack of legislation and support for solving

International Trade committee  I would add that when it comes to the harvest equipment we manufacture, the two main players in the world on that are both Canadian companies—ourselves and MacDon in Manitoba.

International Trade committee  I would agree with that to the extent that, if we do the minimum we've requested, which is to be on equal footing with the U.S. with respect to the copyright exemption, we're still on an unequal footing because of the lack of interoperability, that we have to pay to interoperate—

International Trade committee  —at the expense of our innovation spending.

International Trade committee  [Inaudible—Editor]

International Trade committee  If you take a keyboard and plug it into your computer, it's just one connector and you just plug it in. What we have to do in our industry is take wires from each individual key and open up your computer and take those wires and plug them into each individual key on the keyboar

International Trade committee  It is submitted.

International Trade committee  Legally.

International Trade committee  It's possibly always been the case, but the nature of the equipment was always straightforward interconnectivity. The one thing that happens when you move from an old agreement to a new agreement is that you modernize it to reflect the realities of modern industry. I think that

International Trade committee  We weren't consulted until we went chasing for it. We saw news reports about IP terms in the agreement, which raised red flags, but we didn't initially understand what the impact would be. It took some time and research to start to see where this was going to impact us. We start

International Trade committee  We've worked with Global Affairs, ISED, Canadian Heritage, the Ministry of Agriculture. We've had the round-table discussions. It's a problem looking for a portfolio to live in. No one wants to take ownership of it. It needs to be solved or industry is dead.