Evidence of meeting #23 for Canadian Heritage in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was artists.
A video is available from Parliament.
Liberal
President, Music Canada
I mean, we have seven very specific recommendations. Music education, by the way, is a key piece.
Member of the Board, Radio Starmaker Fund
This might make it a bit more clear. The heart of the new technology was reproduction devices, tapes, cassettes, CDs, whatever way people could duplicate sound and video, copyrighted stuff. There are countries in the world where the tax on the sale of each individual one of those things isn't really a tax at all; it's a fee that goes directly back to the people who created the content that goes on to those things.
If I have it correctly, in Canada that tax goes to the general pool of the Canadian coffers. That's a simple step. I would say that we should get that money directly.
In 1982, nobody was using a cassette tape for anything, or 99% of the usage of cassette tapes was to copy my songs. Five years later, that was the case with burning CDs. Right now that happens on the Internet.
As Graham said, for anyone who is looking for someone's song, the top hits are free. It's the policing and the taxing and then the redistribution of the funds that come directly from it back to the people who created the content that people are copying or streaming for nothing. That's the specific thing that I think all of us would like to see happen.
Liberal
Stéphane Dion Liberal Saint-Laurent—Cartierville, QC
Does that mean reopening the Copyright Act, or are there other ways?
President, Music Canada
That's one way, but the other way is to rebuild the marketplace.
The access model, as I said before, is here. Streaming services are the way that people are going to consume music in the future.
You had Deezer here, I believe. These are fantastic services that give you access to millions of titles. The market wasn't ready for them in 2002-03. It's ready for them now. They cost $9.99 or $4.99; there are a variety of prices. We have to start driving people to those services.
Google Play is a wonderful service. The problem is, when you search for music on Google, you get illegal results, and people go to what is free.
Part of a strategy is finding ways to encourage people to migrate to these incredibly good legal services, which include social media components, a huge number of titles, high-quality sound. It's great. Build back the marketplace.
Liberal
Stéphane Dion Liberal Saint-Laurent—Cartierville, QC
Again, are there federal policies that may help do that?
President, Music Canada
Well, in England, for example, they are very aggressively pursuing ad-supported piracy. It's actually the London police department. They're finding the websites that are getting money through PayPal or MasterCard or something and are going to MasterCard and PayPal and stopping them from facilitating the exchange of money between the illegal site and the consumer.
That's one way to do it: follow the money. It's a quite obvious thing. The oddity is that it is London's Metropolitan Police Service that is doing it.
Another way to do it is to work with us so that we can fix the market, fix the way that advertisements appear on digital websites. This is a huge problem.
Ellen Seidler is an independent filmmaker from California whose film was pirated. She set about trying to go through the nightmare of take-down notices, which she has adequately presented to the world on the Internet. One of the key pieces was that she kept going to websites and finding advertisements for major commercial enterprises right above an advertisement for Russian brides and right above an advertisement for something far worse—all right there. When you go to these major corporations and ask what their ad is doing there, they say, “Well, it's there; I don't know how it got there.”
There have to be ways that we can bring some sense to that market. How is it that David Lowery's songs or Alan's songs are being leveraged by illegal sites to make money from advertising?
You can be part of the solution to this.
Liberal
Liberal
President, Music Canada
Yes, I think the Copyright Board.... We have Digital Canada 150. We are trying to put digital innovation at the heart of our nation. Through no fault of its own, the Copyright Board is under-resourced. I think it needs more money, resources, and personnel to turn it into an effective, open-for-business office aggressively getting people into the marketplace, and for those of us who have to go in front of it, hurrying the process up.
So yes, that's a big piece.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gord Brown
That's going to have to be it.
I want to thank our panellists. This was very interesting.
We're coming to the end of our study, so if you have any further contributions, please get them in to us, hopefully by the end of the week, because we'll be working on our report.
Thank you very much.
We stand adjourned.