Good morning, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.
My name is Tanya Woods, and I am legal counsel for BCE, here today representing Bell Media. I'm joined by Richard Gray, who is the general manager of Magic 100, Bob FM, CFRA, and The Team 1200 in Ottawa.
Thank you for moving forward with the copyright reform package and providing Bell Media with the opportunity to present our perspective on Bill C-11. We applaud this government's copyright modernization efforts, which will continue to allow Canadian companies to innovate and maintain a competitive edge in an ever-growing international marketplace.
In the last year, Bell Media has grown and changed as a company. We have gone from being one of the largest ISPs and telephone service providers to also becoming one of the largest broadcasters and content producers in the country through the acquisition of CTV.
Today Bell Media is the proud owner and operator of 33 licensed radio stations, including the former CHUM radio stations, operating in 14 markets across the country. We are uniquely positioned to provide perspective on copyright both as a copyright owner and distributor of content.
While Bell Media supports the goals of Bill C-11, as both a copyright owner and content distributor we would like to focus our discussion today on addressing two significant items of concern that, if addressed, we feel will ensure that this bill is both workable and balanced.
First we will address notice-and-notice; and second, we would like to spend some time discussing the exception for technical copies that are made by radio stations for the purpose of broadcasting.
We believe that the government got it right with notice-and-notice. We are pleased with the proposed regime, and with a few technical tweaks we hope it will prove to be a valuable tool in the fight against piracy.
What could not have been anticipated, but what must be considered, is that since the introduction of Bill C-32 and Bill C-11 technology and content consumption patterns have changed. This is evident when you sit in a coffee shop or airport lounge and read the news on your tablet or smartphone, possibly through the local WiFi connection.
We know from past Bill C-32 testimony that some of the bigger ISPs have been doing notice-and-notice for years. However, they are not the majority. In fact most ISPs are not yet doing notice-and-notice, and neither are most other network service providers, like wireless carriers.
As a copyright owner, we want to make sure that an effective notice-and-notice service is put in place so that we can better educate individuals suspected of piracy while protecting and preserving the neutrality of the messengers, like ISPs who pass along our message.
We know that it will take time for everyone to get their notice-and-notice service up and running at full capacity, including us, and we want to put on the record that we are supportive of granting the time needed to establish and implement an effective notice-and-notice service. We would like to see the bill explicitly provide that time so that we can build our systems to accommodate the new rules before any obligations come into force.
We also want to make clear that we view the notice-and-notice systems as a valuable service, and we are willing to pay reasonable fees to both facilitate network service providers building effective systems and to enable them to ensure that this service will keep up with technology.
We see that as drafted the bill contemplates the possibility that network service providers may not be able to charge any fees for the notice-and-notice service. As both sides of the coin, copyright owner and network service provider, we believe that network service providers need to do their part to enforce rules and pass on to their customers the notices of copyright violations they get from content owners, but also that content owners need to compensate network service providers for the cost of doing this. It is only fair.
For example, people using a courier service must pay a fee to deliver their messages. There is no exception for businesses in that case, and there is no reason for notice-and-notice to be any different. But of course we are just looking to cover our costs.
To conclude our comments on notice-and-notice, we ask that you provide the time needed to build an effective notice-and-notice service and ensure that network service providers can recover the costs to set up this service, which is to the content owners' benefit.
I will now ask Richard to speak to you about radio.