With regard to copyright, we note that a brief was submitted to the federal government during the last consultations. It can be provided to you as necessary. What we are presenting now is a summary of certain aspects addressed in that brief.
With regard to piracy and protective measures, I will briefly say that, in representing all producers in Quebec and Canada in music and the audiovisual field, we filed an application for an injunction against a Quebec website that was permitting illegal file sharing. The Superior Court rendered a judgment and ordered that the site be shut down. One week later, the site was back on line, but hosted outside Canada. We continued our efforts for a year and a half before we came to the conclusion that it was impossible to fight. They had chosen a country that did not give us access to the identities of the persons responsible for operating the site. We thought it was the same people. Experience has shown us that it is very difficult to achieve a result against mass piracy. In our view, the persons responsible for this kind of website are clearly acting illegally. However, it appears that's not so clear in the act.
To solve this problem, we suggested ensuring that there is a clear statement that these providers of content retrieval tools are acting illegally and that, for those who choose to protect their content, the way of circumventing content should be made illegal.
We're also talking about the responsibility of intermediaries, but I won't go into the details. We'll come back to that in greater detail during the question period, if necessary.
With regard to ownership of copyright in an audiovisual work, we agree with other stakeholders that the act is silent on this point. You have to wait until the product is finally created in order to determine, through the courts, what creative contribution determines who holds copyright. To date, the case law has granted copyright to producers, screenwriters and directors, but it is never clear, never certain. There are types of production where there is no script. There are also types of production where the director merely broadcasts. The solution we propose in order to reach a permanent resolution of this situation and to simplify the release of copyright—a matter of greater importance with regard to digital—is to make provision for a scheme of exemptions for the employer, as is the case under the Copyright Act. In the context of people's jobs, when something is created, the employer is the first holder of copyright to succeed in exploiting it. In our view, the producer of audiovisual content, the only person who is there from start to finish and who hires people in turn and as necessary, should be granted the same kind of exemption and be the first owner of copyright.