Good morning, members of the heritage committee.
My name is Maureen Parker and I'm the executive director of the Writers Guild of Canada. Also with me today is Kelly Lynne Ashton, WGC director of policy.
The WGC welcomes this opportunity to appear before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. The Writers Guild is the national association representing more than 2,000 professional screenwriters working in English-language film, television, radio, and digital production. Our members are on the forefront of the creation of cross-platform, convergent, and transmedia content.
Screenwriters are today's storytellers. As such, they welcome these new opportunities to entertain, but they are also worried about the challenges and about how they and we, as Canadians, are going to meet those challenges. We are appearing before you today to urge you to support a comprehensive national digital strategy to help screenwriters meet these opportunities and challenges.
A national digital strategy must first ensure that there is sufficient funding to create professionally produced digital entertainment; second, it must ensure that Canadian-owned and Canadian-controlled enterprises exist to support Canadian content, and that they have appropriate incentives or requirements to do so; and third, it must amend the Copyright Act and support terms of trade to ensure that fair revenue streams flow back to content creators.
First we'd like to talk a bit about what our members are actually doing in digital media. They are taking advantage of a variety of new creative opportunities. They write webisodes such as the ones for Little Mosque on the Prairie, in which characters from the television series extend the experience through additional stories. They also write original web series, such as the award-winning My Pal Satan, which is about what life would be like if your roommate were Satan.
My Pal Satan is an example of how digital platforms allow screenwriters more creative freedom. Our members not only write for linear formats but also for interactive games such as Autotopsy, which is an extension of the television series Crash and Burn.
Screenwriters are experimenting with the convergence between story and game, and some members are breaking new ground with innovative new forms of storytelling, such as the Twitter soap opera Crushing It. By the way, we know that you do not have time right now, but we'd be happy to stay after the meeting and show you a few of these examples on our laptop.
Canadian screenwriters are interested in developing new methods for reaching audiences directly, without having to go through broadcasters. The online world offers very quick feedback from audiences. This allows writers to respond immediately, as they can incorporate ideas as they continue to create.
Also, the lower cost of digital production means that screenwriters can become digital content producers, overseeing all aspects of production in a way that just cannot be done in traditional broadcast television. Screenwriters now have control over their stories all the way through production to delivery to the audience.
Digital platforms also offer more opportunities for the distribution of traditional television programming as Canadians migrate their viewing to online platforms. Canadian television can now be viewed on broadcasters' websites and cable companies' online portals, and it can be downloaded to own through iTunes. Unleashed from the broadcast schedule, more Canadians will get a chance to view Canadian programming.
The primary challenges for everyone working in this digital world come down to money. There must be more money to fund new digital production and fair compensation for the exploitation of both new digital content and traditional television content.
Let's start from our very basic principle that screenwriters and artists need to be paid for their work and need to earn revenues from the exploitation of their work. We look first to our collective agreements and individual contracts to set minimum fees and identify revenue streams. We need to be flexible in collective bargaining and contract negotiation to take this new digital world into consideration.
Online business models are in flux, so it's difficult to identify where and how those revenues will flow. This is our challenge as a guild. What we cannot address alone are lost revenues from common consumer uses such as illegal file sharing and saving to hard drives, which are currently not allowed under the Copyright Act and not compensated for.
We don't want to stop these uses, but rather make them allowed uses for consumers and put in place collective licensing to compensate creators for those uses. There has to be a balance between consumers and creators.
It has been suggested by some that fair dealing be expanded to include these consumer uses. While this solution decriminalizes this common behaviour, it also eliminates revenue streams to creators. We therefore oppose the expansion of fair dealing or other exceptions to copyright infringement except in those specific cases, such as allowing for parody and satire, where it makes sense. Of course we agree that the definition of fair dealing and other exceptions to copyright infringement should be technology-neutral and not so specific as to require amendment again when technology evolves, but they should also not be so vague as to allow every use imaginable under the name of fair dealing.
Another challenge is that the lack of revenue flowing to screenwriters from online distribution is not just limited by things like illegal file-sharing. Broadcasters are demanding more rights from producers for the same licence fee. For example, if a broadcaster exploits a TV show through iTunes downloads, in most cases the broadcaster keeps that revenue, and it is not shared with the production community. We support a terms of trade agreement between the broadcasters and the producers, because without it no one but the broadcaster earns revenue from these new uses. We will be working with independent producers to ensure that compensation flows equitably to the creative community.
Kelly Lynne.