Canadian Heritage Committee on May 29th, 2018

[Pierre Nantel, NDP, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

You rest your case right there as an attorney.

Perfect. That says it all.

I have one last question for Mr. Trudel.

The system used by Spotify was mentioned, and it is true that the situation is certainly better on their platform than on YouTube. However, in spite of that, the royalties are appalling. The major international publishers have negotiated them for their profit, and are looking for shares of data sales around the world. That's how they make money, it seems.

I believe that the artists of the group Les Violons du Roy, who are certainly very important to you—I discovered them at the Opus Awards galas—are part of the Fifty Shades of Grey compilation. They performed a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach, if I remember correctly. It's a compilation that certainly had very high visibility worldwide.

Do you think it is possible to ask the artists of Les Violons du Roy to assess their royalties or to compare the amount they received for this performance and the amount they received following their greatest success as artists?

You talked about the discoverability of concert artists, who are also from Quebec. Do you think that's interesting?

It is true that the Spotify and Apple Music platforms are much better than the YouTube platform, but the creators receive lousy royalties. Isn't that right?

[Dominic Trudel]

Yes. Absolutely.

We would have to ask the artists from Violons du Roy. I don't have the figures, but it's very clear that the royalties that musicians have received are not comparable to what they could get from the sale of albums, for example, when albums were selling a lot.

[Pierre Nantel, NDP, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

That's right.

In light of what Mr. Henderson just said, I note that we are not in a niche market. Fifty Shades of Grey becomes mainstream material, so we can see that it can work, worldwide, for major products like Fifty Shades of Grey, but maybe not at all.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

Thank you.

We will go to Mr. Hébert.

Mr. Hébert, the floor is yours for seven minutes.

[Richard Hébert, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you very much for your presentation, Mr. Trudel.

Mr. Morrison and Mr. Henderson, it was very good.

My two questions are for Mr. Trudel.

I understand that you provide training and support services for artist management through your Diapason platform. Am I mistaken?

[Dominic Trudel]

No, you're not mistaken. That is indeed the case.

[Richard Hébert, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Here are my questions.

Do you have such services for copyright information?

Do you think that the federal government should have permanent tools to make artists, as the rights holders, aware of copyright?

[Dominic Trudel]

Absolutely.

There is training on copyright. For artists, simply figuring out what they are entitled to and how to go about asserting their rights, especially when it comes to self-production, is extremely complex. Artists are increasingly called upon to produce their own work. The complexity of the clauses they must keep in mind makes it extremely difficult for them to exercise their rights, because they must understand all the nuances of copyright. It is a challenge to train artists who choose self-production and are representing themselves, but we are doing it and we hope we can do more.

Yes, tools are needed to make artists aware of their rights. The philosophy of sharing and discoverability means that, if an artist does not get a monetary gain from the distribution of their music, they will still gain visibility, discoverability, and so on. Since artists want to expand their audience, they will be readily generous and let their products go, but they should get some royalties in return. It is therefore very important to have proper, standardized and consistent tools so that the rhetoric is the same across the board.

The government certainly needs to think about tools for artists.

[Richard Hébert, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you.

My next question is for Mr. Henderson.

The European Union and the United States have recently adopted new copyright standards, particularly in the digital realm.

Considering that we share an area of economic integration with those two entities—I am specifically referring to the United States, of course—should we harmonize our copyright laws and regulations with theirs?

[Graham Henderson]

Absolutely, and I think that's why, if you look at the four suggestions we've made, you'll see that this is not really so much adapting to what the EU is doing at this moment. It's more catch-up, and that's the problem: we haven't caught up. We've let these old subsidies kick around. We haven't extended the term of copyright. We've allowed the private copying levy to become a shadow of itself, all because we haven't played catch-up. The first step is to do that.

What the EU is doing is taking a much broader, more comprehensive look at the entire digital ecosystem, and it's focusing in fact on the safe harbours, among others. In the United States, the Music Modernization Act—and I think that's what you were referring to—also falls into that category of a law that is catching people up and addressing imbalances, but what everybody shares in common is, thankfully, after all this time people and governments are recognizing that somewhere along the way they got it wrong. We got it wrong. These were good-faith errors, and we now need to help creators. We need to level this playing field. We need to start putting creators at the heart of our policy-making.

[Richard Hébert, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you.

Do I still have some time?

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

You have two minutes left.

[Richard Hébert, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

My question is for Mr. Henderson once again.

Do you think that the current protection system for companies doing business over the Internet is sufficient to cut down on piracy, an activity that everyone is engaged in abundantly?

[Graham Henderson]

A lot of people felt that pirating went out the door with CD pirating. In fact, one of the most formidable challenges that we face today is stream-ripping. We all know we're living in a world where most people access their music through a service like Spotify, Deezer, or YouTube; it's online streaming. It was referred to earlier as an access model by Mr. Trudel. So it's an access model; we're not selling something.

I'm sorry, I just lost my train of thought on the question. What was it?

[Richard Hébert, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Do you think the protection system that the companies are using is sufficient to halt piracy?

[Graham Henderson]

Right, sorry.

Now we live in a streaming world and we have this problem with stream-ripping. What that means is you can get a very simple program that takes a stream and converts it to an MP3 file, which you then keep. The moment you do that you have destroyed the marketplace for music.

Are we doing enough? I don't think we are ever doing enough. It's not necessarily the problem that it was once, but it's a very significant problem and it erodes the ability of legitimate services like Spotify to convert subscribers to paid subscribers when all you have to do is get a stream-ripping service, rip the stream, convert it to an MP3. So it remains a problem.

[Richard Hébert, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

You have 30 seconds left, Mr. Hébert.

[Richard Hébert, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

I will give it to my best friend.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

You have about 30 seconds, but you can have a minute if you want.

[Richard Hébert, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

No, it's okay. I think Gordie is ahead of me.

Go ahead.

[Gordie Hogg, Liberal, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

I'm so pleased that we're best friends. That changed my day. I'm feeling a lot better about that. Thank you.

I came into this thinking I had an understanding, then thinking I'd lost the understanding, and now I'm trying to come back to getting an understanding.

In the four recommendations you made, you talked about the value gap being the issue, and then trying to respond to that value gap with these four recommendations. There were what you called “good-faith errors”, and now we're to take remedial actions. I think you're trying to get us contemporary. I don't hear anything in there about future flexibilities. I guess you're talking about getting to the here and now and then at that point looking into the future to see where we go from there.

Am I still with you?

[Graham Henderson]

You are, and there is lots more the committee is going to hear from folks, and there is lots more that can be done, but if you're looking for something immediate and something that harmonizes our laws and redresses ancient wrongs, these are the things to do.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

We are over time.

[Gordie Hogg, Liberal, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

I was just getting really good too.