Evidence of meeting #109 for Canadian Heritage in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was creators.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Anju Dhillon Liberal Dorval—Lachine—LaSalle, QC
Good morning. My question is for everybody.
What are the biggest challenges artists face in terms of remuneration? What changes would they like to see? What kinds of changes would they like to see to the Copyright Act?
Could you enlighten all of us about that? Thank you.
Director General, Creative Marketplace and Innovation and Deputy Director of Investments, Department of Canadian Heritage
Well, there's a whole list.
Again with all the necessary caveats, you will have creators asking for a longer term of protection, for example. As Mark explained, in Canada it's the life of the author plus 50. In our discussions with creators, you will often hear from certain creators that they want it to be life plus 70. Others will say that's not a good idea.
For each issue that I will bring forward you will have one camp that says it's a good idea and you will have another camp that says it's not a good idea. Term of protection, then, is one.
Artists' resale right we spent a bit of time on earlier. It's something that comes up often when we meet with creators from the visual arts sector. There's a broader issue around exceptions for educational publishing. That's a no-brainer. It includes exceptions in the act, but also the categories for fair dealing. Transparency is one that you will hear about. Efficiency of the Copyright Board is a crucial one, in particular for the music industry.
What else am I missing?
Lara Taylor Director, Creative Marketplace and Innovation, Department of Canadian Heritage
I want to touch on one thing. There's a lot of discussion about creators, yet, as you well know, it's a very heterogeneous group, covering a multiplicity of sectors but also a level of sophistication. Creators of large works are from more traditional industries where there are set patterns of copyright and there's more of a sophisticated understanding of copyright itself and where the act they believe should be changed.
We've also been doing quite a bit of work to look at a much different group of creators, potentially your average creator, someone who is creating but may not have a sophisticated understanding of copyright. One of the things we've been trying to do is better understand—and this comes back to copyright literacy—it's equipping creators not only with a basic understanding of copyright so they can better leverage their rights, better monetize their rights, and better protect and negotiate contracts. It's also so they can better speak to policy-makers about what they'd like to see from the copyright and the general arts frameworks. I think there's a whole list of a lot of different issues that more sophisticated rights holders have brought forward. Then I think there's a list that we probably haven't yet heard a lot about from your average creator.
Liberal
Liberal
Director, Creative Marketplace and Innovation, Department of Canadian Heritage
You'll be getting a list, yes.
Liberal
Director General, Marketplace Framework Policy Branch, Department of Industry
From our perspective I think my colleagues are bang on in the sense of you'll get a desire for new ways to negotiate with partners. Some people have indicated they'd like a requirement to negotiate with certain other content distributors or others or platforms or others.
Maybe to put it in its broadest context, I think one of the things you'll hear over the course of the study is the constant balancing of public policy priorities. People often think about balance as being between users and rights holders, but the copyright system is serving many people because of the ubiquity of copyrighted content. You'll hear from folks who say these people should pay more, and then you'll hear from those same people that they're an important industry that needs important advantages and needs to be well looked after. You'll get that balance in spades. Each of these creators is asking for the value of their works to be understood. The users of those works are asking for efficiency and transparency and the means by which they have to pay it.
Liberal
Anju Dhillon Liberal Dorval—Lachine—LaSalle, QC
Have you noticed if any of the stakeholders or those who have a lot to gain—it's usually the middleman who makes most of the money—have been barriers to artists or to the protection of artists' rights?
Director General, Marketplace Framework Policy Branch, Department of Industry
To Lara's point, I think we can put people into different camps, and it varies enormously by medium because there is a relatively robust infrastructure in Canada to assist creators in being able to understand and work together. Often, that comes with assistance around getting into values so getting to market, getting to a collective, or other things. I think there's another category of folks who have no idea how the copyright system functions. One of the goals of the intellectual property strategy that was a feature of budget 2018 was to increase the overall understanding of intellectual property within the marketplace, recognizing its centrality to the modern economy, and I think that would include copyright.
NDP
Pierre Nantel NDP Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you again to our witnesses.
If it's true, as my colleague Mr. Shields mentioned, that the legislation cannot change the mentality that copyright isn't important and that everything should be free—a culture that will definitely have to change, if possible—can we also say that the act can, at times, have somewhat of a perverse effect?
When we defined fair dealing for educational use in 2012, certain discrepancies arose that are still noticeable today. Currently, many authors, who are represented by Access Copyright or by Copibec, see their work being used under the pretext of fair dealing for educational use, and aren't paid in consequence. By analogy, let's imagine a similar provision for fair dealing for electricity that would excuse people from paying their electricity bills if the electricity is used for educational purposes!
Can we say that, in 2012, when the Act was reformed, we created a precedent, at a time when our previous collective rights management system was working quite well? Personally, I think that this is the issue that causes the most people to contact us, whether it's copyright holders or people in academia, who come tell us that bachelor degrees are so expensive for our young people. It's true, but these young people aren't paying for their books, even if they do pay for their baked beans and Kraft macaroni and cheese!
Do you have any comments to add?
Director General, Creative Marketplace and Innovation and Deputy Director of Investments, Department of Canadian Heritage
We have also had a lot of people come to discuss this issue with us. Allow me to go back a few years to help out your colleagues.
In 2012, the government added a certain number of categories for fair dealing, including education. It's also worth remembering that the current problems related to copyright certainly stem from the act, but also from the case law. That same year, in 2012, the Supreme Court of Canada provided a rather broad interpretation of the word “education” in the context of fair dealing.
This decision is indeed controversial. On one side of the debate, we have academic institutions, especially in English Canada, that have developed guidelines around copying for educational purposes, which are not only based on the definition of fair dealing provided by the Copyright Act, but also on the case law, specifically the Supreme Court of Canada decision. In Quebec, the situation is a little different, except with regard to the Université Laval.
On the other side, the publishers of educational material, the Access Copyright collective is of the opinion that these guidelines are much too permissive. This issue always finds its way before the courts; just look at the current case between Access Copyright and York University.
So, to confirm what you're saying, it's still a contentious and polarizing issue. One of the questions the committee might want to ask itself is, how can we defuse the situation? How can we get people to the table to find a solution that works for everyone? Université Laval aside, there is precedent in Quebec. Copibec, Access Copyright's sister organization, is pursuing agreements with all of Quebec's universities, and everything is going well. Will it continue that way? It will depend on future decisions. I think that the decision in the York University case is an important one, and it will be interesting to see how things play out since it has been appealed. We'll see what happens, but one thing is certain: This is clearly a recurrent issue.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Julie Dabrusin
That brings us to the end of our round of questions. I just wanted to do a quick check around to see if anyone had more questions, but we do have some other work to go to on cultural hubs.
Mr. Nantel, do you have a question?
NDP
Pierre Nantel NDP Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC
A minor clarification, please: Is stream ripping a real issue? Is there a way to quantify this phenomenon of stealing music from streaming websites that offer this service? This seems to be the reason why we're being asked to enhance the private copying system.
Director General, Marketplace Framework Policy Branch, Department of Industry
We have no data on how much stream ripping is or is not happening. We do have this public opinion research that we just completed that has some notion of the mechanisms by which people are accessing content both legally and illegally, which gives us some sense. As I indicated in my opening remarks, the illegal usage is, thankfully, quite low, but with every new technological phenomenon, people have found a way to use it both as the law imagined and as the law did not.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Julie Dabrusin
We're doing two minutes for each side to do it quickly.
Thank you for these questions.
Next is Mr. Shields, for two minutes.
Conservative
Martin Shields Conservative Bow River, AB
Thank you.
I'll go to Ms. Taylor.
The co-operatives have existed for some time, and you're talking about literacy. What strategies are you going to change for those co-operatives if you're going to increase the literacy? They've been there before, so what are you going to do? You talked about more literacy with the co-operatives. What strategies are you going to do differently?
Director, Creative Marketplace and Innovation, Department of Canadian Heritage
Sorry, just to clarify, do you mean artist co-operatives?
Director, Creative Marketplace and Innovation, Department of Canadian Heritage
Like collective societies.
We haven't been working specifically with collective societies on literacy. Collective societies tend to represent particular artists or particular rights that artists have. I do think collective societies actually do a great deal to bring literacy copyright information to their members.
We receive calls from the public. Frequently we send artists to their relevant collectives to learn.
Conservative
Martin Shields Conservative Bow River, AB
You said there needs to be more work with literacy with those groups. What are you going to do differently from what you have done in the past? You said you're going to change that.
Director, Creative Marketplace and Innovation, Department of Canadian Heritage
Sorry. I didn't mean to say I was going to change it. What I can tell you is we haven't been working specifically with collective societies, but we have been looking at working with creative hubs where it's much broader in terms of the kinds of creators that come to creative hubs to learn.
We have recently completed an experiment with Artscape in Toronto where we're looking at how copyright....
There are, for example, online courses for copyright. Creators can go and learn from them. We haven't heard that they have necessarily been very effective because copyright is so complex. It can be so case dependent. With the kind of creation I do, how can copyright better improve my ability to monetize?
The experiment we did was on copyright, if it's embedded in an entrepreneurial skills development course at a creative hub, the different ways it's embedded and how creators can learn from it experientially as opposed to just learning something from a book or a speaker and whether that makes a difference in terms of their ability to then apply copyright.
There's a long way to go in this kind of work, but it's looking at copyright as a practice as opposed to copyright and learning what's in the act.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Julie Dabrusin
Thank you.
For the final question, we go to Mr. Hogg, for two minutes, please.
Liberal
Gordie Hogg Liberal South Surrey—White Rock, BC
I've become quite confused, thank you. I thought I was on a committee dealing with copyright. Then I'm told the legislation is not always the only or the best way to deal with things. We're broadening out. Then I see the word “nudge” a little further along, so I'm trying to decide whether this is about the economic modelling and behavioural economics and the notions of nudge coming out of that as you're looking at other marketplaces or ways of doing it.
Am I anywhere near what you're talking about or am I living in a different reality here?