Thank you for this opportunity to speak today on behalf of the ACP. It represents 127 independent publishers from across the country. We have members in all provinces. They publish books in all genres: literary books, cookbooks, children's books, general interest books, scholarly works, and textbooks. They represent, by and large, small- to medium-sized companies, and I would have to say their emphasis is more on the small-sized than the medium-sized companies.
Though a few are affiliated with universities and other not-for-profit organizations, most are owner-operated businesses—independent, English language, and Canadian owned. The multinational publishers located in the greater Toronto area represent to our members the chief competition in the marketplace. We have no foreign-owned companies in our association, but we share some common ground with them on copyright, and particularly on Bill C-32.
For all publishers, copyright is the ground that we stand on or the roof over our head—you can pick your metaphor. It's the sole source of our revenue. Authors give us the right to make copies. We produce copies and sell them, and we sell the rights to other publishers to produce and make copies in other languages, other territories, and other formats. That's it. That's our business. We have no concert revenue. We have no spinoff merchandise. We carry no advertising in our pages.
The revenue that derives from copyright is the sole revenue for our members, so it's not unreasonable that we are pretty interested in this bill. We are really glad to see it come down the pike. We've waited a long time for it and we're glad to see a bill get to this point. We've watched others fall off the tracks over the years.
We do have a few concerns, and there are four in particular I want to talk to you about today.
The first step for us is the education exemption. It is, as written, so broad and so undefined as to create enormous uncertainty for our industry with respect to its markets and future prospects. I was interested to hear the students say that any uncertainties can be resolved in the courts. I don't think anybody thinks that this would generally be the best outcome.
For our members--small businesses--legal solutions to this kind of problem are the last thing we want to see and can afford. We can't afford expensive litigation, and we can't afford to lose the market share that is at risk while all this plays out. We are interested in seeing clear definitions of “education”, and of the context in which this exception would be applied.
We are also concerned about the reduced role for collective licensing we see in this bill. The model represented by Access Copyright and Copibec has worked effectively for a long time to produce, as a result of much trial and error and many arbitrated decisions, broad access to a huge range of copyright-protected materials in a convenient and affordable form. If you want to negotiate the price, that's a market decision. If public representatives choose to do away with a lawful business model, that's a political decision. And if that model has a long history of working well for many institutions and individuals, that's a counterproductive political decision.
Our third point was addressed in the previous session on the limits to statutory damages for non-commercial use. We too are struck by the difference between copying by individuals for private purposes and the much broader and much less well-defined term of “non-commercial use”.
Finally, the extension of provisions on interlibrary loans to digital works—those provisions that applied previously only to print—causes serious market problems particularly for university presses in Canada, which publish the majority of Canadian scholarly journals. A change like this will severely undermine that market and perhaps eradicate it.
The total of all this—one of many—is a disincentive toward the production of intellectual property. While I was interested to hear the students talk about how access to intellectual property is one of the cornerstones of an innovative economy, if there is no incentive to produce those materials, then an innovative economy is the last thing we're going to have.