Thank you very much, Madam Lavallée. I'll answer in English, if that's okay, just so I can make myself better understood.
I would respond in a couple of ways. First of all, the act, as it exists now and as it would be amended by the bill, creates the same rules for everybody. So whether you're a large corporate rights holder or a small individual creator, the same rules apply to everybody. And the same holds true for Canadian creators and non-Canadian creators. We have an obligation to provide the same level of protection to everybody.
So when you talk about the lost revenue--and I'm not familiar with the figures you cited--certainly, I'm not aware of any money lost through a time-shifting exception, because right now people can use a VCR or a set-top box or a computer to record television shows, and there's no revenue associated with that. So I'm not sure the bill is going to cost anybody any money.
But I think a more fundamental point is that using the Copyright Act to try to sustain some minimum level of income for creators--which I think is a laudable goal and a good public policy objective--has some problems, because the bill applies to everybody. So if you create a measure hoping to provide some moderate level of income to Canadian artists, the way the provision will be applied, most of the revenue generated won't go to Canadians. It will go to large corporate American rights holders who have the bulk of the market in the U.S.
From our perspective, we should set ground rules in the Copyright Act that allow creators to market their creations and to benefit economically, and then on top of that, if we think Canadian artists--because we live in a smaller market and they have a much more difficult economic challenge--require additional support, then as a matter of public policy we should do that directly. We can't target support for Canadian artists through the Copyright Act, because most of the money will simply go to creators from other artists and to those who already get the most airplay, the most CD sales, and the most ticket sales.