Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Good afternoon.
I would like to thank the members of the legislative committee for allowing us to give testimony before you today. My name is Alain Lauzon and I am the general manager of SODRAC. Joining me is Martin Lavallée, Director, Licensing and Legal Affairs.
SODRAC has been around for 25 years. In music, we manage reproduction rights, and in visual arts and crafts, we manage all the copyrights of the repertoire we represent.
As a collecting society, we play an important economic role for the thousands of authors, composers and publishers that we represent in Quebec, Canada and abroad. Actually, copyright is sometimes the only compensation creators get.
The members I represent are active in three sectors: musical works in songwriting, audiovisual musical works—television, film, video games—and artistic works in visual arts and crafts.
The Copyright Act is the essential foundation granting creators ownership rights for the work they create. The reproduction right, which is separate from the performance right, is a fundamental right recognized in the Copyright Act, as well as in international treaties and the Berne Convention, to which Canada is a signatory.
The Internet has brought about changes in technology that have transformed the way works are distributed, disseminated and used. That is why the act must be modernized. The question is at what price. Producers say that the measures proposed in Bill C-11 are sufficient, but that is not the case for creators.
In the music industry, Bill C-11 will have a significant impact on our rights holders. Introducing and changing exceptions for broadcasters, not extending the private copying regime to include digital audio recorders, and extending fair dealing to education are all provisions that affect existing royalty sources. The bill also creates new exceptions for users and consumers, without any compensation for rights holders.
That adds up to more than 40% in royalty losses for the authors, not to mention the weakening of financial instruments that authors and collecting societies use. Also, this bill does not provide any legal or financial solutions to the problem of illegal file sharing and the responsibility of Internet service providers.
Music has never been played, listened to and copied to the extent that it is now. The Copyright Act should continue to provide us with the legal framework necessary to exercise the ownership right with respect to the works of the authors, composers and publishers we represent and to enable us to play our role as a collecting society and compensate them properly.
In terms of artistic works, we believe that Canada should introduce resale rights, just like over 50 other countries, including those in the European Union. Resale rights would enable creators and their rights holders to receive a portion of the resale price.
Creators must be able to participate fully in culture and in the new digital economy through the Copyright Act. We are in favour of the legal protection measures for digital locks, although some platforms used for the distribution of works do not have them yet. Digital locks can be effective in some sectors, such as film and video games, although they are currently more beneficial for producers than creators.
Furthermore, rather than creating exceptions without compensation, we believe that it would be better to favour the licensing system by collecting societies in order to allow access to works. Collective management has demonstrated to be quite effective for both users and rights holders, whose compensation it guarantees.
The technical amendments that we are proposing in our brief represent a minimum threshold in order to avoid an irreversible imbalance between those who create the content and those who use and consume it.