Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you all for your presentations.
Of course, the Internet does provide opportunities for visibility. As you said, an unknown becomes
somebody else, but he remains poor. He remains poor unless he has a world market access.
Dollarama stores are full of products sold at cost, but they make a small profit because the things are sold on an international scale.
There is a problem with artists whose customer base is normally made up of the people around them, the people in their communities, say, in Quebec or Acadia, because they can never be big enough to achieve a critical mass and then to become a consumer product at an international scale. It may not be the ultimate goal of every artist to conquer the planet, but we do want to earn a living from what we create. I am talking as if I were an artist, but I am not one at all. I have no artistic talent.
Ms. Bouchard, I notice that your concern with the private copy scheme is also a concern of a number of others, including the Coalition pour la culture et les médias. I do not know if we are going to have their representatives here, but they have sent us a brief that they prepared specifically for us. Actually, they sent it to the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology when it was studying copyright. It talks about the importance of adapting the private copying scheme to new technologies.
I would like to ask you about that. Everyone in my generation remembers making cassettes on which we put the songs that we liked. Then the CD-R appeared. That was wonderful because all our songs fit on it. Today, that seems to have been replaced by streaming services that we have access to. However, some people still steal music. The general impression is that music does not cost a lot. It should cost more, because the artists are poorly compensated because of the agreements to which Mr. Willaert alluded. Since it is our impression that music no longer costs a lot, we wonder who is still stealing it.
Do you subscribe to the view that, with music worth less and with plenty of it legally available, this means that even people who know the subject wonder why the private copying scheme still exists?
Ms. Freeman or Ms. Bouchard, could you tell us precisely how much more it would be for an iPad costing about $700, for example. The House of Commons paid for mine, so the amount is approximate. How much would the private copying scheme add to that in order to compensate the creators for their losses?