Thank you, and good morning.
My name is David Basskin. I'm the president of CMRRA-SODRAC Inc. (CSI). With me are Alain Lauzon, CSI's vice-president, and our legal counsel, Casey Chisick, and Martin Lavallée.
CSI represents the reproduction right in musical works—songs. Broadcasters, including commercial broadcasters, the CBC, pay audio, and satellite radio at present pay CSI when they reproduce works in our repertoire.
Since 1997, the act has required payment only if a blanket licence is available. A single payment licenses the millions of works in our repertoire.
Broadcasters pay CSI either pursuant to tariffs certified by the Copyright Board of Canada or through negotiated agreements. They paid CSI $17.6 million in 2009-10.
The commercial radio broadcasters want you to strip away our rights. Why? They'll tell you that the copies they make are worthless. That's nonsense. Expert evidence, accepted by the Copyright Board, extensively documented the benefits that broadcasters receive from these copies. For one example, through voice tracking, broadcasters can produce a four-hour program in just 20 or 30 minutes.
They'll tell you that it's unreasonable and unsustainable to continue paying seven-tenths of one percent of their earnings for the right to make copies. Unreasonable? They pay 5.7% of their revenue to all collectives for the music that makes up 80% of their programming. Unsustainable? When the commercial radio tariff was introduced, the industry enjoyed average pre-tax margins of 10%. In 2009, in a severe recession, their margin was 21.2%.
And there's this: the broadcasters want a double standard. They license the reproduction rights in their broadcast programs to media monitoring companies. They receive a royalty of 10%, and for 2011 to 2013 they want a 40% increase, to 14%, ten times higher than the 1.4% they themselves pay to reproduce music, seven-tenths of a percent for songs and seven-tenths of a percent for recordings.
There's no similar exception that applies to Canadian broadcasters' reproduction rights.
However, even if the broadcast mechanical right were left as it is, other provisions in Bill C-32 would undermine the rights of our members. Alain Lauzon will speak to those other provisions in the bill.