Thank you very much.
Marvin Dolgay and I are representing the Creators' Copyright Coalition. Mr. Dolgay is a musician and composer and the president of the Screen Composers Guild of Canada. He's one of Canada's leading composers of music for film and television. He's also the vice-chair of the CCC.
I'm Bill Freeman. I'm a former chair of The Writers' Union of Canada, and I'm the chair of the Creators' Copyright Coalition. I write books for children, adult non-fiction, plays, and documentary film scripts.
We're here representing the CCC, an organization of 17 of the major creative groups, which represent about 100,000 creators.
I understand that you have received our broader brief. I'm not going to go into that in detail. I'm just going to make some additional comments.
When Canadians think of creators, they usually think of the rich and famous, but Marvin and I are much more typical. Like small business people, we earn our living from different sources. We do a little better than most, but surveys show that incomes of creators are low, somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000 per annum, from their creative works. Many have alternate jobs. That's how they support themselves and their families.
Creators believe that copyright legislation should be designed to encourage creation. Writers, musicians, visual artists, actors, and other creators are on the very cusp of the digital revolution, and that revolution should stimulate a flurry of new creations. But if exceptions are created in the Copyright Act so that there's no protection for their work, it could become a dead zone for professional creators, because they cannot earn a living from the material distributed on the Internet. At the moment, we fear that Bill C-32 will create that dead zone.
Let me make three general points about Bill C-32. First, every creator we know about wants his or her works to be widely distributed. We don't want it locked up. That's why they've gone to such effort, after all, and the pain, to create their works. But they do want to be paid for what they do. The principle guiding the act should be payment for use. It's as simple as that. Bill C-32 goes in the opposite direction in some cases by making a host of new exceptions, and those exceptions will be damaging to many creators.
Second, Bill C-32, frankly, is filled with confusion. We've been told by lawyers that it's overly broad and unclear in many places and will lead to complicated litigation that will cost millions of dollars and will take years to resolve. That's probably the worst thing you can do, because creators will have to pay for their share of that litigation. All that will happen is that you'll enrich the lawyers, and it'll come out of our pocketbooks.
Third, the Internet has changed the business model for almost every creator. The secondary use of material--that is, the chapter of a novel excerpted in a public school or the song on the radio or the audiovisual clip--is increasingly how works are being distributed today. There's nothing wrong with that. It's collective societies, though, who manage those secondary rights for creators, and the legislation, we feel, should strengthen the collective society. Bill C-32, in many instances, does just the opposite. It weakens SOCAN, certainly Access Copyright, and all the other collective societies that manage rights.
I'm going to ask Marvin to make some comments on the impact of Bill C-32.