Thank you, long-suffering Chair. Have I told you lately what a good job you do?
Thank you, gentlemen. This is fascinating. I'm glad to have you here.
What we always hear is that this is about balance. Everyone who comes to us says, “Listen to me because I've got the balance. The other guys are unbalanced.”
There's something I've noticed. I've found two interesting perspectives on copyright. Mr. Webster, you tell us it's about stopping people from stealing your sofa, that it's a property right. Copyright isn't a property right. Copyright is a construct of Parliament going all the way back to Queen Anne's Law, which was designed as a public good. And the good was to remunerate the artists and to decide the limits on that remuneration. It's not like you own a house and you pass that house on to your kids.
Mr. Wilson, you're describing copyright as a laudable goal for Canadian artists. But it's not the Canada Council. I don't care if Bono is going to make a lot more money on Canadian radio than is Sarah Harmer. Copyright is fundamentally about ensuring that artists get paid. Otherwise, there is no business model.
You say we shouldn't worry about updating the levy. But we have some $41 million directly in musicians' royalties that would be lost, from the mechanical royalties that are going to be tossed out if we don't update the levy in some form of digital format. That's a serious amount of money, and that's not counting the other areas where artists are going to lose.
Don't you think there is some obligation, if we're going to talk about copyright, to recognize that it's actually about people getting paid for their work?