Crown Copyright.

The Government should give up crown copyright. There are two parts to crown copyright:

1) The obvious part.

When the Government publishes something, copyright in that publication lasts 50 years.

2) The not so obvious part.

What happens to material that the Government doesn't publish? The way section 12 of the Copyright Act is normally interpreted is that unpublished material has permanent crown copyright. Unpublished government material is the only thing in Canada that receives permanent copyright protection. So unpublished government material from World War II and further back is still protected by copyright.

Statistics Canada and many other government agencies publish valuable information that Canadian individuals and businesses want to reuse. Our tax dollars have already paid for this, as long as we acknowledge the source why shouldn't we be able to reuse this information without getting Government permission?

Crown copyright allows the Canadian Government to control its publications and information in ways that should be unnecessary in this day and age.

Getting permission from the Government to use crown copyright is byzantine. Many government employees don't seem to know who to refer people to get permission. Government departments differ widely in what they will allow and how to get permission. It is far more straightforward to go to a private publisher and get a yes or no, then the Federal Government.

Relinquishing crown copyright will allow more competition for business that use government information and stimulate investment.

There is a real concern that came out of the Net Neutrality and especially the New Media Hearings with respect to collected and renumerated data the ISP's are currently or would like to collect from it's users in improving their business models that needs to come to bare in this discussion.

Many within the creative industries are asking for the monetization of the networks.

One of the industries concerns on this issue of monetizing the networks is they need to rely on renumeration and distribution of collected funds to creative talent.

We know through submissions to the CRTC that ISP's have the ability to collect data relating to renumeration for marketing purposes that can be applied to distribute collected monies from users.

The real threat to the creative communities is that ISP could sell the information they are collecting to the highest bidder, thus providing an upper hand to those that can afford to pay for this information, even if the networks are not monetized.

This will have a direct impact on all smaller distributors, and creative talent tied in with them. The law must reflect this to ensure information collected will remain in the public domain, and we should be looking at ways to monetize the networks to create renumeration for the creative industries, not on laws that will effectively remain unenforceable with the general population.