Thank you.
My name Alain Pineau and I'm the national director of the Canadian Conference of the Arts.
I will jump immediately to the second paragraph.
When it comes to copyright, we at the CCA have members who are rights holders and members who are rights users. So we are quite sensitive to the position you may find yourselves in as lawmakers when it comes to this prickly pear.
It is from the broad and unique perspective of the Canadian Conference of the Arts that I come here to comment on Bill C-32. I will concentrate on the big picture and let our member organizations propose specific amendments to ensure the Copyright Act really works for the benefit of the Canadian creative economy, of Canadian consumers and, obviously, of our artists and creators who should be at the centre of our preoccupations.
Copyright is a key piece of any national digital strategy and should be one of the cornerstones on which Canada defines its place in the global knowledge economy. Failure to amend the legislation and salvage C-32's more positive provisions could severely compromise Canada’s cultural and economic performance.
I am going to skip the next two paragraphs.
Let me start with the positive.
First, we all agree that it is high time that Canada update its Copyright Act, and we thank the government for attempting once again to bring this important piece of legislation up to date and in line with our international obligations. We share the urgency, but not at any cost.
Second, it is clear that Bill C-32 satisfies a number of people, particularly in the corporate world and the entertainment, software, recording, and cinematographic industries. Our members rejoice that those components of the cultural sector are satisfied with the bill, so I am not here to dispute the lists of happy campers, which Mr. Del Mastro has quoted often, both in the House and here, but I will point to the still longer list of people for whom Bill C-32, as it now stands, is hurtful.
Third, on the positive side, Bill C-32 contains elements that are viewed as positive by artists, creators, and cultural workers in general. I refer here to the distribution right, the reproduction and moral rights for performers, the length of protection of sound recordings, and the rights to photographers.
Let me now move to the negative aspects of Bill C-32. The bill's main flaw is that it fails to recognize the existence of at least two very different kinds of markets. The bill proposes a one-size-fits-all approach, which clearly satisfies the big players and all international company interests but which is far less important to the majority of Canadian artists.
The proponents of the bill argue that it gives artists and creators the tools necessary to protect and monetize their work and develop new markets: they simply have to put digital locks on their works and resort to the justice system to have their rights respected. Locks trump exceptions, which has Professor Geist up in arms and does not satisfy the education community either.
But since locks are not an option for most artists and individual content creators, the bill is rightly perceived by them as a de facto expropriation of their property rights without compensation.
The lock-litigation approach is disconnected from the realities of life of most Canadian artists and creators. The world of most Canadian artists is not that of Ubisoft or that of CRIA. Forty-two per cent of Canadian artists are self-employed. They don't have the resources to monitor Internet and wireless users to see if they are infringing their property rights. Because they are busy creating their art and developing new business models that seize upon the opportunities of direct access to their audiences, they don't have the time or financial resources to launch complicated court cases against those who illegally copy their work, whether for commercial or non-commercial use.
The unprecedented YouTube exception and the broad fair dealing purposes included in C-32 turn current copyright law on its head by signalling to users that they can infringe copyright as much as they want until someone sues them for damages. Even these are limited by the bill in such a way as to favour intentional infringement. To have their rights respected, the creator, publisher or producer must demonstrate that the market for their works has been significantly damaged, a notoriously difficult burden of proof.
The challenges they may face are perfectly illustrated by the case of Claude Robinson, who has been in litigation for the past 15 years to defend rights, which this bill will jeopardize further if not amended.
For those of you who are not familiar with Claude Robinson's case, I've added a summary at the end of this presentation, which of course I will not read.
The precarious situation of self-employed artists was recognized by a previous Conservative government when it adopted the Status of the Artist Act in 1992. This act created the possibility for individual artists and self-employed creators to be represented by collectives.
In order to facilitate access to their works and ensure proper compensation, over the past 20 years artists have established a number of organizations responsible for collecting and distributing royalties to artists and for defending their interests in front of regulatory bodies and tribunals. Collective societies provide consumers with easy access to copyright-protected content and rights holders with efficient management for many uses of their works, replacing numerous uneconomic, low-value transactions between creators and consumers, for their mutual benefit.
One of the core problems--
