Thank you.
My name is Martha Rans. I'm the legal director of the Artists' Legal Outreach. I've been a lawyer for 18 years, advising artists in all disciplines.
The ALO provides advice and information to thousands of B.C. creators every other week in the province. As a copyright educator, I lecture before hundreds of students of art and design, who are the future of the creative sector in this country.
Creativity flourishes irrespective of the law. It always has and always will. However, it does not exist in isolation from where artists work, present, speak, perform, build, and think. It requires some level of support. For many artists, copyright has supplanted arts funding as the mechanism through which we in society recognize and implicitly value their creativity.
I'm not here to talk about products and innovation, information and data, or a religion, for that matter. I'm not a legislative expert, an academic, or part of an industry. I'm here to share with you some of the experiences I've had with artists—whether they're in Temiskaming or Vancouver—around copyright.
Bill C-11 as it stands is too complicated for most digital producers to be able to interpret, and the fear of litigation harms individual artists and the cultural sectors they too comprise. This is particularly the case where we have limited access to legal advice, education, and information. This doesn't mean that we need more lawyers. It means that we need a framework built on solid principles and clear policy that are well understood by the public and creator alike, and that will enable artists to negotiate for themselves.
Bill C-11 as currently drafted fails to provide a copyright framework that is clear, predictable, or fair. The user-generated content provision is an example of this.
Here, you're proposing to legislate in an area where I would suggest it's quite unnecessary. Our sons and daughters will continue to create and upload videos of themselves dancing to Justin Bieber, whether we like it or not and whether or not there's a law. That has always been the case.
As a result in part of YouTube's algorithms intended to automate to identify potential third-party content, other sites have emerged without those algorithms—Vimeo, Blip, and others—which suggests to me that an exception is not required to enable any of us to find outlets for our self-made creations, and we don't need a law to do that.
Josh Hite, a Vancouver media artist, made a video called Chug Chug Chug, based on clips he found on YouTube. The exception as drafted makes it no easier for him to show it, even at a festival. Even a non-profit festival in Brazil has turned him down.
We are, however, seeing best practices emerge that respect original creators and do not penalize users. It seems to me to be worthwhile to avoid unnecessary legislative intervention that could slow the process. Getty Images recently announced a mishmash competition. It seems to me that copyright holders like Getty have adapted to the new digital landscape.
A new copyright regime that enables artists to create transformative works is what we need, one that respects how art is actually made. At the Vancouver Art Gallery right now, Sonny Assu and Jackson 2bears have work in their show that arguably infringes copyright, and Bill C-11 does absolutely nothing to change that fact.
To the extent that amending fair dealing could enable an acceptance of transformative use, then perhaps we could make use of those amendments. I'm not convinced, however, in light of the fact that this will undoubtedly foretell a significant amount of litigation.
Adding education to fair dealing will not solve the funding crisis that educational institutions and other publicly funded institutions such as libraries, museums, and galleries have. The result of the opting out of the AC tariff by various post-secondary institutions in 2011 is evidence of that. I doubt very much that adding education to fair dealing—though I personally support doing so on philosophical grounds—will change that. There's a continuing widespread misperception about the impact of that change.
In the absence of statutory licence provisions that mandate specific uses that will enable our copyright collectives and will address digital reproduction rights to artists, I don't see this taking us further forward. There are now communities of folks seeking to make it possible for widespread sharing of resources across many platforms in legislative environments—