Mr. Speaker, I listened closely to the hon. member's speech, and she touched on a number of important points. The Conservative member said that authors need to be protected through punitive measures. I am wondering if the hon. member shares my belief that it would be much better to pay a levy on the new technology we are using. I am not talking about a tax, but a levy that would be paid at the time of purchase. This money would go to the creators.
When a composer writes a song that is then stolen by thousands of people, he gets no revenue, so he has no way of suing the thieves, the people who are stealing his work. That is the problem. It is easy to say that artists can just sue someone who steals their work, but they do not have the means to do that.
The easiest way to avoid the problem of massive legal costs would be to just collect a levy when someone buys a device that can record 1,000 or 2,000 songs. That would bring an element of fairness, as was the case with blank cassettes when everyone was recording songs on them. There was a levy of 50¢ or 60¢. Or it may have been 28¢; I do not remember the exact amount. This money was given to the creators. We could do the same thing with new electronic devices.