Thank you very much.
Since this is probably the last time we will be speaking at this legislative committee, I would like to say that the Bloc Québécois finds it extremely regrettable that this bill will die on the Order Paper. About a month ago, we made an offer to the Minister of Industry and the Minister of Canadian Heritage to try to get this bill through.
The first thing we asked was for the ministers to ensure through this bill that artists would receive all the money to which they are fully entitled. We suggested that this be done by modernizing the private copy rules, withdrawing the education exemption and reintroducing royalties for ephemeral recordings, which amounted to annual revenues of $126 million. The Bloc Québécois could not pass this bill without that revenue going back to artists.
We find it extremely unfortunate that this government has preferred to impoverish its artists and the cultural sector rather than to adopt this important bill, which is needed in order to clamp down on piracy and illegal downloading as well as to clarify situations such as the one you have just told us about.
Mr. McGreal, you referred in your presentation to the first copyright act, known as Queen Anne's Law. You are a scholar, you come from a university and you are responsible for research. In your research, you have probably looked up what the queen of England said at the time that first copyright law was passed. We have to remember that publishers and printers at that time controlled the manuscripts and printed them as much as they liked, without caring about the authors. Not just novelists, scientists too.
That period was called the Enlightenment in Europe, and scientists were becoming very important. The queen of England, who was good to her subjects, wanted to educate them. You are right on that score. So she passed this law—she was the first to do such a thing, too—which was a sort of revolution in that authors were finally provided with rights. She found that both scientific and literary authors no longer wanted to share their works with printers and publishers, because they used them and made changes to them but paid little or nothing to the authors. The printers and publishers took over the ownership of the works.
The queen of England took inspiration from the philosophy of John Locke, who made the very important point that people own their intellectual work. The creation belongs to the creator and not to the user. Your rights and interests have to be seen from the perspective of the creator's rights. When you buy a book, you are not buying the content, the novel: you are buying the right to have it in your possession in a given format. You read the book, but the creation still belongs to the creator.
Digital books need to be viewed the same way. The creation still belongs to the creator. The digital format is just different and more modern. The principle does not change. The creation belongs to the creator. If we want culture in both Canada and Quebec to develop and blossom, and if we want creators to continue to produce work, we need to show great respect for the process of creation. I do not believe that access is the problem. In your university, there is no problem with access. The problem is the requirement to pay. If you wanted to obtain a second digital book, you could easily do that. You could also obtain a printed version of the book and pay royalties through Access Copyright.
There are a number of ways to access the information contained in digital and print versions of books. But we need the author's consent to do so, whether we are talking about a scientific author or a literary one. Authors must be paid, since they created the works and are responsible for them.
