Thank you very much, and thank you for your presentations this morning.
I guess when we try to address the issues of Bill C-32 we are talking about copyright—the right to make copies. In French it's
“les droits d'auteur”,
the rights of the author.
We are in a different realm because everybody can make copies. Ten years ago people could make cassettes. Now we can copy books, we can copy television, and it's offered us the greatest distribution platform in human history—and it ain't about to change. The question we have as a committee is how do we address what rights and whose rights?
This is the tricky situation, because it seems from listening to my colleagues in the Conservative Party—and they're getting some things right on this bill; they talk about consumer rights and they talk about corporate rights, the right to lock down content. An individual artist doesn't put a digital lock on; Sony gets to put the lock on. So we have the principle that they're going to protect corporate rights; they're going to protect consumer rights.
But we're looking at the issue of what happens to the artists' individual revenues: the actual right to be paid for the copies, which was always the fundamental principle of copyright.
Do you see this bill as an attack on that right, and an attack on collective licensing?