Thank you.
Members of the committee, my name is Gerry Barr. I'm the national executive director and CEO of the Directors Guild of Canada. With me today is Tim Southam, a director of both television and feature film on both sides of the border and chair of the Directors Guild national directors division. To anchor him for you, for those of you who watch House, his most recent work was in evidence in last week's episode, so if you're a fan of that show and want any backstory, he's the guy to go to.
This is, of course, a series that has more than 50 million viewers around the world, and it's a classic example of what the Canadian audiovisual industry can do in terms of both level of quality and dramatic series.
DGC is a member of Mr. Stohn's “day in, day out” crowd. As a national membership-based labour organization, it represents over 3,400 key creative and logistical personnel in the film and television and digital media industry, and we're pleased that after more than a decade and numerous attempts, copyright legislation in Canada will be updated with the passage of this bill.
Bill C-11 brings our copyright regime into compliance with WIPO treaties. It takes steps to protect creators from content theft, it rightly classes parody and satire as new categories for fair dealing, and it attempts to modernize Canadian copyright laws for a new digital age. All of this is very welcome.
The preamble to the bill sets out the importance of “clear, predictable and fair rules” to support creativity and innovation as well as the importance of legislation that “provides rights holders with recognition, remuneration and the ability to assert their rights”.
Naturally, we strongly support those principles, but we're here to say that Bill C-11 still needs some help to live up to those important goals.
As an organization with members who both create and use copyrighted works, we know that copyright reform is a balancing act, and we're here today to ask for technical change to ensure that Bill C-11 contains the clear rules that are called for in that preamble.
Clarity is at the heart of effective copyright legislation. Creators and copyright holders need to know where they stand and what limitations are in place to benefit users' access to the works they create. The absence of clarity leads inevitably to having courts decide these matters. Costly time-consuming litigation benefits no one—not creators, not users, not others in the production chain—and should never be seen as preferable to clear and predictable legislative rules.
Technical amendments can protect rights holders' revenues and their ability to control how and where their work is disseminated, as well as protect users from unintentionally infringing on those rights. To that end, the DGC is one of 68 arts groups supporting the package of amendments submitted to this committee by the Canadian Conference of the Arts.
I'd like to turn to Mr. Southam for a few words.