Canadian Heritage Committee on April 15th, 2010

[Aline Côté]

Yes.

That gives you an idea of the relevance of the ads and of how difficult it is for us to protect the moral right of authors against this type of utilization.

I want to underline that in Quebec, French-Canadian publishers have generally reacted very well. We looked at the situation and concluded that our only power against such a major actor as Goggle violating the Canadian Act that is protecting us was to create our own collection of digitized books, a collection that we would control and that would respect our rights. So, we asked our members to withdraw en masse from the agreement.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

You are referring to the agreement that Goggle was imposing to the whole Earth.

[Aline Côté]

That was because of a class-action. We were involved in that class-action because our books had been digitized in US libraries. There were 170 countries and I don't know how many languages. In fact, we had two options. Either we accepted the agreement to take advantage of the few benefits it would produce, or we decided to withdraw from it. Our conclusion was that, if we wanted to protect the French-Canadian culture, we had to create a critical mass of works in our language and from our culture, to get money to digitize them quickly, and to teach our publishers how to digitize their works.

We set up an aggregator which allows us now to reverse the situation with our thousands of digitized works, our own collection. We have a very specific culture that is recognized. This allows us to have some negotiating power in order to work with the big online bookstores of the world such as Amazon, Goggle or Apple. We have even set up some agreements with several online bookstores. We already sell our digitized books online. Furthermore, we are on the verge of concluding agreements with Apple for our aggregator to be present everywhere.

This will ensure the blossoming of the French-Canadian culture through our digital strategy, one of the components of which was, last year, our withdrawal en masse from the Goggle agreement. Ninety-three per cent of our publishers withdrew, and their decision is celebrated all over the world.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Did you receive any help from the Canadian government through the Department of Canadian Heritage? Did you receive any financial support, moral support or any other kind of support?

[Aline Côté]

I believe that we have received $50,000 from the Canada Book Fund for the launching of the aggregator. There are also some subsidies to help the publishers to update their knowledge of the digital world.

However, what has been lacking—and which Quebec is presently providing us through SODEC—is a direct subsidy for the production of digitized books. The Quebec subsidy allows us to accelerate significantly the production of digitized books from all our publishers.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Did the minister...

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

We have to move on. If there was a question for the other gentlemen, maybe they could get that answer to Madam Lavallée.

Mr. Angus, please.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you.

Well, this is a fascinating discussion. I'd prefer to be meeting with each of you over a beer, or a glass of wine, to go further, but I have only five minutes; you're going to have to excuse me.

I want to start with you, Mr. Gaylor. Rip is seen as a manifesto on copyright change, but would it not be the case for many of the documentary filmmakers in Canada today who are not able to access works that have been picked up by corporate interests that control the copyright and will not allow access to footage that otherwise would be in the public domain? Is that a serious legal problem for the development of documentaries in Canada?

[Brett Gaylor]

Yes, certainly; I don't know if I got that across in my presentation, but as I mentioned, we have done surveys within our membership showing that the cost of clearing copyrighted materials is growing exponentially. Obviously, for documentary filmmakers, this is particularly challenging if we are taking on subject matters that the corporations who hold the copyright on the material do not agree with.

Just to use my own example, if I was making a critical point about Walt Disney, they are under no obligation under copyright law to license me that material for any price. So in that sense, having no fair-dealing release valve in our law, or no clear one, can act as de facto censorship. I know this has happened to many filmmakers. They're just unable to take on the types of issues they want to because of copyright laws.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

It certainly happened with John Greyson and his film, where he used Mack the Knife. Even though Mack the Knife is in the public domain, they still threatened to sue him if he showed his film anywhere. Yet McDonald's took Mack the Knife and didn't ask permission, and had a television ad. So John is a potential criminal.

Madam Côté, I've written five books, and I've been a magazine publisher, so I feel very strongly about the idea of the quality of work. I agree with you; I have a new book project, and people tell me to put it online. Well, I could, but to me it's not a real book. Maybe I'm old school.

Madam Lavallée showed off some products, so I'd like to show some of my product. If anybody wants, they can buy some for the office.

Now, this is interesting. I have five books. Two of them are on Google Books. I was pretty shocked to find my books on Google. Two of them are on, and two of them we decided not to put on, because the photographer said--I worked with a photographer--clearly, it's very easy to take the photos on the Internet, so it devalues the overall work.

So Google has two options. You could say sue them, but you can opt out. So we opted out for some of the books. We said no, we don't want them...because the photography could be easily taken.

Now these other books are remaindered, and this is the issue. When a book is remaindered, the book value of a remaindered book is zero. If there were a good small publisher, I'm sure your publisher would call the writer and ask them if they wanted to come and take all the books out of the warehouse. Otherwise they would go to the landfill or to bookstores to be sold for $2 or $3 or $5, and the author would get nothing.

So I have two books on Google, and they can be researched. If someone wants them, they can go to Amazon and buy them. I guess I could probably say that...if I was saying I didn't want to support the Google revolution, it might help my pocketbook. My wife's a writer, and every time I come home there are five books sitting on the table. I say, “Where did these books come from?” She says, “Oh, I was researching, and I found this out-of-print book, and I went and found it on Amazon”, and I say, “Laird tunderin jaysus, the last time I came home there were five rare books that you bought.”

So how do we make it possible...? I like the model Quebec decided on. You decided you didn't like the Google model and that you were going to do your own. Is it possible that we can maintain a platform for people to find out-of-print books that otherwise would go to remainder, so that they can research them and find them? Do you think your model is a reasonable model for Quebec authors, or is this something we're going to have to continue to turn to legislators like us for to try to sell?

[Aline Côté]

We rejected the Goggle model not because it is not a good model but because it did not correspond to any of our practices. It did not correspond to our legislation and to our agreements with our authors. It would have squandered our cultural assets. Were we to find our books a bit everywhere for nothing, how would we be able to market them under other formats, on another platform, while at the same time paying the authors what they are due? We know that libraries have digitized books massively, even here in Canada, and that they have adopted practices that are not beneficial to publishers, but that is because they do not have enough money. For everything that is presently free of copyright—the whole national Canadian heritage that is not copyrighted—we should absolutely grant massive subsidies to our libraries to help them digitize it. If we want that to be available somewhere, it will be easy to set up agreements with the libraries so that it be present on our own platform, which would not be difficult to organize and would be fantastic. It would mean that all the books not protected by copyright could be found there.

Of course, everything that is copyrighted belongs to the publishers. We would rather that funds be used to support the publishers for everything that is copyrighted. That way, the publishing industry would be able to create quality works which... Every time there is a copy of a copyrighted book, the publisher would be able to grant the copyright free of charge to a library under the exemption rules already present in the legislation.

I must tell you that our platform is already linked to other French-language platforms all over the world, such as Numilog or Materiels.fr, and that the people who maintain it, that is to say our Association and the technology company, work with online bookstores. We negotiate contracts and agreements, we set up business models, and we work with the people who design e-readers such as the iPad. We would also like them to design audio readers for our visually disabled persons but, at this time, those exist only in English. That is one thing that Canada could do for its cultural minorities.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

We have to move on. We've gone almost seven minutes on that one.

Mr. Uppal, please, for the next question.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you all for coming here today.

Mr. Anders, to me The Mark is a prime example of where our society is going, people going online not only to participate but to get information as well.

You say you're a business. Well, you are a business; can you elaborate on how your website exists and what advice you would give to the committee and other people looking to exist only online as an enterprise?

[Jeff Anders]

There are a few questions in there.

The first thing is how do we exist? I moved to Toronto in January 2008 with an idea and I said I was going to try to build this, a media company that was going to create Canadian content, targeting the Canadian market, at a time when the stock market was dropping 40%. People literally laughed at me. They said, “Why are you going to invest in Canada? Can't you make this into a global thing?” I couldn't find even a cent to put behind this idea.

Friends and family put a little bit of money behind me basically keeping me alive for a few months while I was doing consulting work out of my basement.

Eventually, we found a group of private investors who were prepared to put some funds behind the idea, the reason being that they saw there was some potential in building a platform. They saw that, in terms of mobilizing a community of experts, there was a proven model in the United States called “The Huffington Post”. They saw that this thing could grow and become profitable. Without that element, this could never have happened. We didn't have a business model at that time. We had ideas that we wanted to incubate and experiment with, and they believed in it. That's how we got started.

How do we make money? We don't right now. In fact, we have almost no revenue at all. We have some number of months left before we're dead. But we are doing a number of things that I think are going to be very successful. One is advertising, standard advertising but not standard, because we can host conversations at The Mark where people who are contributing to that conversation are really interesting and we can engage a lot of people. So as an ad model, it's a little bit different.

We can syndicate content. We can sell it. We believe we can curate communities for universities and other companies that have communities of people who produce content.

For example, we have a partnership with Amazon.com where, if somebody comes to write for our website, there's a link on that page to Amazon.com where that person's books are featured. So you write something today as an author at The Mark, commenting on a current news story, and boom, traffic is flowing to your page at Amazon, your books are being sold, and we get a commission on that.

There are a variety of other things we can do as a media company to profit. We're not even close to there yet, but we're getting there very quickly.

To distill my remarks down to a summary, I would say the only way we could survive is if we were able to demonstrate to discriminating investors that we were going to be able to create something that would be self-sustaining and that was going to capitalize on trends and be sustainable into the future.

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

How do you measure your audience in terms of how far-reaching it is? How do you measure that?

[Jeff Anders]

That's a good question.

We measure it in a variety of ways. One is just the sheer numbers: how many eyeballs, how many pages, how much time do they spend on the page, what they do there, and those kinds of things. We also measure it by geography: where are these people coming from? Our audience is huge in Ottawa, Toronto, and Vancouver. We're trying to be better represented across the country.

Those are the main metrics right now of how we measure our audience.

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

Do I have more time, Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

You have one minute.

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

Okay.

In the online world, there's a skill set there; you need to have some skills. Are people are coming into that world with the right skill sets, and what can we do to promote those skill sets?

[Brett Gaylor]

I think it's really about critical thinking. It's one of the reasons that while the remixing I'm describing now might seem almost trivial to someone who has done it, it's a very practical application of critical thinking. It's about somebody who's able to deconstruct advertising and political messages, and create their own. It's a very participatory act, a very democratic act, to add your own point of view to a discourse in a media landscape.

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

Can you teach that, though?

[Brett Gaylor]

Yes, you can teach that, absolutely. You can teach it in school, you can teach media literacy. I think Canada ought to have a media literacy component in its public schools. There's no better way to teach it than to give a 13-year-old girl a bunch of advertisements that are clearly targeted towards her and then have her break down the arguments presented to her, to break down the messages and use them to create something new and different, something that's her own contribution to that discourse. Unfortunately, the way our legal system works right now, that's completely illegal. But I think we ought to encourage media literacy.

The other part of my job is with the Mozilla Foundation, and there we call it hacking when you can see how something works and take it apart. A big part of the reason the Internet is successful is that anybody can click a button that says “View Source” and see how that web page has been put together. I think we ought to be able to do the same thing to the media messages thrown at us every day. You can't walk down the street without being sold something by a media company. That's happening every day.

So I think we ought to encourage, in a democratic society, this communication to be a bit more two-way.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you.

Ms. Dhalla, please.

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

Thank you very much for coming before the committee. Your presentations were extremely interesting.

As someone who works extensively with young people, I know that, for individuals like Jeff and Brett, they have really gravitated towards using the Internet and getting their media sources and their information through new means.

I want to touch upon some of the stuff that Jeff said.

Could you perhaps describe for the committee the three biggest challenges you faced as an entrepreneur, as someone who had a vision of creating a new media platform to engage basically a whole new generation? Could you describe some of those challenges that you faced?

[Jeff Anders]

The biggest challenge was funding, which I already discussed, so I won't go into any more detail on that.

I mean, so much of it was easy. Getting people to participate was easy. Getting people to consume it is difficult, because there's so much noise out there. So I would say that building an audience is the second-biggest challenge we face. We've had to partner with established large media companies to make that happen—and this probably supports a lot of the views Madam Lavallée was mentioning. I think those are the two biggest things.

What has been quite easy, though, is getting support. So the investors who helped us.... This ties into your question, Mr. Uppal, about advice for people who are trying to do this in the future...is to go out and find senior people, or for this government to encourage senior people who have resources, be they financial or be they expertise, to mentor younger people and to throw their weight behind these types of projects. We could not have gotten to where we are right now, and could not continue to grow the way we do, if not for their networks and the introductions they provide. It's way more than just the financial support.

When we've reached out to different organizations, they've all gotten behind the idea and said, “Yes, this would work for us.”