Canadian Heritage Committee on April 15th, 2010

[Ruby Dhalla, Liberal, Brampton—Springdale, ON]

Where do you see this going--perhaps Brett could tackle this as well---in terms of the visual media and the new media three to five years from now? If you could all answer very quickly before my time runs out, what is one recommendation you would give to the committee that we need to ensure we look at in the final preparation of our report?

[Brett Gaylor]

Fair dealing.

Also, to speak to something that Jeff spoke to earlier, one of the fantastic programs we have in Canada, and that Heritage has supported, is the Canadian film and television producers' mentorship program. That does exist for the filmmaking community. I benefited from that greatly, being paired with a professional filmmaking company. My salary was augmented for about a six-month period. Many of my colleagues have done the same.

We ought to continue to do that, but right now it's focused on, again, incumbent industries. I think we ought to--

[Ruby Dhalla, Liberal, Brampton—Springdale, ON]

Expand that.

[Brett Gaylor]

Yes, expand that to new players, but I think we have to create innovation regimes and legal regimes that support the creativity and the business models that these new players are going to want to create.

[Jeff Anders]

I would like to offer a philosophical guidance, that it would be a shift toward empowerment and encouragement and propulsion and away from protection. If you put a MacBook laptop in the hands of every 13-year-old person in this country, five years from now you'll have more content of supremely high quality that is really interesting to people of that age than you could ever imagine.

Content is not being created anymore top-down; it's at the grassroots. Everybody has a web cam, editing software, and it is just unbelievably easy. We're working on a plan at The Mark to put a web cam in every one of your offices so that you could--if you don't have one already--speak into it, email to us the file commenting on a specific news story, and we'll publish it. It's just...empower people by giving them the tools to create Canadian content in their living rooms.

[Aline Côté]

I have a somewhat different point of view.

As far as we are concerned, any type of exemption should be limited. Any broadening, such as the one proposed in the motion of Mr. Angus, for example, would open the door to numerous disputes that would have to be resolved to in court and would clog the system. Creators would have to police the market, which would be terrible.

That being said, we are not opposed to some compromises. Publishers are the biggest purchasers of rights. People may not know it but, like film directors, we have to purchase lots of copyrights. In the education field, we spend millions of dollars for rights that we then grant to photographers, illustrators and people in many artistic fields.

So, we are very aware of the issues relating to the purchasing of rights. Every time there is a problem, we wonder if we should weaken the copyright or instead find other funding to make sure that the copyright is respected.

I want to underline something else. If we accept exceptions that are clearly limited, in order to allow for some other utilizations requested by other industries, it has to be done without weakening copyrights and clogging the courts.

The key word is money. With digitization, we enter into the world of globalization. Other companies make massive investments, of hundreds of millions of dollars, to support their creators, to protect their network and to purchase rights. We are not doing anything comparable. Here, the funding reaches barely 1, 2, 3 or 5% of what exists elsewhere. In other countries, ministers and prime ministers make public statements to complain about Goggle. Here, our Premier and our minister of culture have not done so.

We have not felt any kind of support, here in Canada, in this kind of wild jungle that the digital world has become over the past five years. We have found some solutions. We see more and more clearly where we are going but it is obvious to us that money will be the key word if we want to be competitive with other countries that would want to come here and play in our markets.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

We will move on.

Mr. Pomerleau, please.

[Roger Pomerleau, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I will give part of my time to Mrs. Lavallée who always has interesting things to say.

First of all, I want to thank you for being here. I find this session very interesting.

Mr. Anders, I love what you do. I find that when we allow people to express themselves directly, without having to go through other persons, we reduce what is described by the expression traduttore, traditore, which means that translating is betraying. The more other people are involved, the more the message is diluted. From that point of view, I think what you are doing is fantastic. You have put forward an aspect that is totally innovative.

You have money problems. You said that venture capital is not as easy to find as you would want. Do you think that the little help you receive from the government is absolutely necessary for the survival of your company?

[Jeff Anders]

I should say that we haven't received any money at all from the government. We haven't really been all that aggressive about pursuing it because it didn't apply to us. We didn't qualify for the vast majority of the funding. So right now we're doing it with private friends and family money as well as private investors. But now with the Canada media fund, I think we will have an opportunity at least to apply for something for which we do qualify.

I think in principle, though, what the government funding should do for companies like mine is not to sustain them on an ongoing basis, because the goal here is not to have companies that need to rely on government funding indefinitely. The idea is to give them what they need to have what we call the “runway”--the time that they can run to make the mistakes that are necessary to learn, and to figure out, and to puzzle over these questions that nobody has yet figured out.

What is the business model for the book publishing industry? Nobody knows, but we're trying to figure something out for the news and information publishing industry. We need time, and time is, as they say, money, to pay staff and to just keep the lights on for a few months. That's where I would ask for you to consider ways in which funding could be allocated to companies, not to pay for computers because the costs related to that in the information industry is very low. You can get email from Google for free, and network from Google for free, and everything else for free. What we need most is money to keep the lights on for some amount of time, to learn what we need to learn so that we can be sustainable.

[Roger Pomerleau, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

You have referred to innovation, even more than the other witnesses. You have also used the word incubation to describe the launching of your company. You have used the word mentoring. You have said that you can easily see that in the future as something that could help us enter better in the digital era.

Taking all that into account, and broadening your perspective, would you have anything to tell us about the innovations that you have thought about, perhaps even going outside of your own company, and that could be put in place to help us face that?

[Jeff Anders]

It's a very broad question.

[Roger Pomerleau, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

It is.

[Jeff Anders]

If you could, direct me a little bit more about what kinds of innovations you mean.

[Roger Pomerleau, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

I am referring to innovations to enter the new digital market, taking account of all the problems that we have been discussing today. You do business in your field. You have incubated a lot and you have done a lot of brainstorming to innovate. I suppose that, while doing that, you went outside the box and started thinking about things that could potentially be put in place. Are there any things that you could mention here?

[Jeff Anders]

Sure. I can give an example of something that is quite interesting. It's called Flattr, which is a program that would allow users to allocate small amounts of money to producers of content all over the web. The way it would work is that as a user I would sign up, and I would say I'm going to put $20 in my account this month, then I'm going to go all over the Internet; wherever I surf, and whatever I read, or whatever book I see or song I listen to, I click a Flattr button on each place that I like. If I click 10 times over the course of the month, then the $20 I allocated that month is divided by 10 and given out to the producers of all of that content.

That is one example of how independent content producers might get paid, and it's only one of many. Of course, it would need massive scale. It would need ubiquity. It would have to be everywhere in order for it to work. There are a number of programs like it.

It's a really interesting question to me: how do people get paid for doing work that has tremendous value but they're not being compensated for it monetarily?

[Roger Pomerleau, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

All right. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

We'll move on now to Mr. Uppal.

[Tim Uppal, Conservative, Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Gaylor, today you've mentioned that you feel the copyright laws are too restrictive, and you have a concern that there's no mechanism for royalties and mashups. We as a government have done copyright consultations over the summer. We're in the process of developing copyright legislation.

I'd like to hear from you on the successes and challenges that you've had with homelessnation.org and opensourcecinema.org.

[Brett Gaylor]

I'm very impressed, Mr. Uppal.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Brett Gaylor]

Viva Google.

Homelessnation.org is another project that my colleagues have embarked upon to try to bridge the digital divide. We work with homeless shelters, and other people who work with Canadians who are homeless or living in poverty, to help them to train themselves in digital literacy, more or less. We help them blog, we help them create short films, we help them create audio works.

Now, this is clearly a project that does not have, nor is intended to have, a business model. This was supported through initiatives from wings of our government that no longer exist. I believe they have been put into Service Canada and the National Film Board.

The challenge was that funding for it eventually ran out; however, that website is now self-sustaining. The folks who we helped to learn those skills have now taken this site over on their own. It's a very vibrant website of over 5,000 active users. A lot of the challenges that Mr. Anders described, in building a community and outreach, they've done themselves. It was through that runway that we were able to get there. So it's an interesting example of social innovation.

With opensourcecinema.org, that's the website we created to build Rip. This was a website where I was, in an unconventional way, releasing the source material--if I can say it that way--of my documentary, inviting others to participate and create it together. We wanted to create a Wikipedia-type process for creating a documentary film.

Again, we had some support through the Canadian Film Centre and a fund that was set up by Telus. Then we had some other private funds in there. The challenges of that have certainly been those of incumbency, so with a lot of the funds we're only allowed to access them once we have a broadcaster, and that's an evolving model.

It's interesting that Jeff brought up Flattr, because I think a lot of people would recognize that as a very reasonable way to compensate some authors. It's interesting to note that this project was started by the founders of The Pirate Bay. Again, those are people who a lot of us in this room, especially as creators, would have a lot of beef with.

In making Rip, I had to study the history of copyright law and its intersection with technology. In pretty much every generation there is one group called “pirates”, and in the next generation they are called “admirals”. This debate was fought over radio, this was fought over the player piano, and of course it was famously fought over the VHS recorder, which spurned an entire industry. I think we're in the process of fighting that out over the Internet.

There are some really smart people who have put a lot of thought into how to compensate authors in an age when books are going to be digitized and music is going to be available. It is not a matter of “if”. We are already living it--right now. As much as we want to discuss in this room whether it's appropriate, it is happening.

I feel that your responsibility is to help us create environments where the proper business models can emerge rather than constantly trying to stop it...or in fact, as in the case of Bill C-61, the breaking of technological protection measures. Now that was protecting a technology that the industry had actually abandoned, in the case of audio recordings.

So I think we need to create environments that are very nimble. We need to have a fairly light touch, but we do need a touch.

[Tim Uppal, Conservative, Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB]

That makes sense.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you very much.

I can only say thank you very much for your candid answers. I'm quite sure that the members around the table, if they have any questions, can direct them to you directly. I appreciate your appearing today.

With that, the meeting is adjourned.