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City of Edmonton response to government of Canada consultation on a modern copyright framework for online intermediaries – May 2021
The City of Edmonton is supportive of the need to provide protections for intellectual and artistic copyright-protected content. Creators of this content have a right to protect their intellectual and artistic products. The City further appreciates the public policy complexity of seeking a balance between protecting copyright content and ensuring dissemination and use of copyright-protected content that is enabled through exceptions and limitations in copyright legislation.
For the City and public libraries, this public policy challenge illuminates the complexity in our collective eorts to address the digital divide between those who have ready access to computers and the internet (and thus, increasingly digitized services), and those who do not. Serious consideration needs to be given to how the changes proposed in this consultation could further exacerbate that divide and the municipal mechanisms to address them.
The changes and reforms being proposed in this consultation are concerning to the City of Edmonton. The City provides free Wi-Fi internet access in City facilities, including City Hall, and the Edmonton Public Library provides internet access to library visitors through computers and Wi-Fi. In both cases, the City and the library system can be interpreted to be internet service providers (ISPs) and online intermediaries.
Open City Wi-Fi is a free public Wi-Fi Internet access service provided courtesy of the City of Edmonton to patrons of some of the City’s publicly accessible facilities. Edmonton oers Open City Wi-Fi to about 2,000 locations around the city. Currently more than 14,000 devices connect to Open City Wi-Fi every week, resulting in more than 2TB of data trac. The service also routinely accepts over 4,500 concurrent sessions during peak periods daily. The City of Edmonton is committed to ensuring Open City Wi-Fi remains a reliable, sustainable and supported service.
The Edmonton Public Library (EPL) acts as an online intermediary in several ways: by providing free internet connections and access to computers, by creating digital collections of materials for education, preservation and research purposes, and by oering platforms that enable user participation. In a typical year (2019), over 2.4 million customers connect to and use EPL’s wireless service, amounting to 203 TB of wireless data usage, and over 800 thousand hours of computer usage. Statistics Canada’s 2018 Internet Use Survey results indicated that the share of users in the lowest income quartile who access the internet from the Edmonton Public Library was higher (14.2%) than the national total of similar library users across the country (11.2%), and was highest overall in Edmonton across income quartiles.
The City and the Edmonton Public Library are concerned that they may be impacted by the policy changes proposed in the new copyright framework for online intermediaries that are intended to regulate the “web giants”. Open City Wi-Fi, the Edmonton Public Library and aliated organizations, such as archives, museums, and educational institutions, need to be able to continue to carry out their public service missions and not be subject to the same onerous restrictions as web giants.
Open City Wi-Fi in its current form and as it is currently regulated is relatively inexpensive for the City to provide to our citizens. The City does not incur much additional infrastructure cost as the free Wi-Fi runs on top of existing infrastructure that serves our own needs. There is also no authentication or user registration process, so the administrative and support overhead is also minimal.
This would change under the proposed online copyright framework. The proposed framework introduces the idea of new obligations on ISPs, such as notice and takedown (US approach) or requiring the ISP to block access by the infringer, or to infringing content, and new potential actions, such as action against the intermediary if they are aware of the likely infringing action.
Since the City currently does not collect user information of the users of Open City Wi-Fi, it is not possible to comply with the existing requirements to forward notices of claimed infringement received from copyright owners to third parties alleged to have used our services. If these notice obligations change as proposed, we will continue to be unable to forward notices without beginning to collect and retain user data. New obligations, such as monitoring of Internet trac, site blocking, or tracking and retaining all user data would add substantial complexity to providing internet service, and new costs. The identity of users of wi or computers in most public spaces is not tracked and retained, nor is a record kept of their activities while using the Internet. Introducing this type of retention would be a substantial administrative burden for many cities and libraries. Should the intermediaries' safe harbour protections be changed, the amount of administrative overheads will become substantially higher in order to fulll our obligations and enforcement.
If intermediaries like the City of Edmonton and the Edmonton Public Library are accountable for regulating what individuals do on their access points - Wi-Fi and public computer terminals - the additional costs would need to be borne by either users of the service or the municipal taxpayer. As such, there is a real risk that the suggested changes in this consultation could become a barrier towards the goal of bridging the digital divide in Canada’s urban municipalities, impacting the overall economy and social health of our communities.
The provision of free Wi-Fi and internet access by libraries and municipalities is currently “passive” under the current denitions. We assert that safe harbours should be maintained when the ISP intermediary is a “mere conduit” or is caching, and that monitoring of activity must not be required by those providing free Internet connectivity and/or devices that enable access for the public for non-commercial purposes in non-prot, educational and government settings.
We propose that the federal government provide an exception that excludes municipal governments, libraries and educational institutions from the denition of online intermediaries, and that excludes these organizations from any increased responsibility or liability being considered for content repositories and information location tools that they manage or host. These types of organizations which provide a means of telecommunication should not be responsible for the content being transmitted.
The City of Edmonton appreciates this opportunity to participate in this consultation on a modern copyright framework for online intermediaries. We understand the Edmonton Public Library is working with its partners in the Canadian Federation of Library Associations to provide a more comprehensive submission on the impacts of these proposed changes to the library system. The City of Edmonton supports those eorts as well. We look forward to the ongoing dialogue that will undoubtedly be required to address this complex public policy matter.
For further information:
Yetunde Oke, Chief Policy Advisor Intergovernmental Aairs
City of Edmonton
Email: yetunde.oke@edmonton.ca