Canadian Heritage Committee on June 5th, 2018

[Jason Klein]

I think it's a matter of potentially putting less in and not more. It's not limiting rights to particular platforms. It's making rights general and stating them in general terms, which is really where we started before this slew of new exceptions came in.

To the extent that there are exceptions—and perhaps they're appropriate in the case of personal, non-commercial uses by individuals—as soon as commercial enterprise is involved, and they're trading on the value in our intellectual property, we need to keep it simple. The message needs to be that you can't use that without returning fair value to the creators.

I think it's probably a “less is more” scenario than over-drafting in order to address the future. It's keeping the principles simple and clear, and I think that will likely lead to more neutrality in terms of the future technology that develops.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Okay.

Mr. Daigle.

[Gilles Daigle]

First of all, it's a great question. I think it's interesting that when you look at the key asks—if I can put it that way—that the music industry stakeholders have put forward, they in fact can be corrected with very little legislative change.

You talked about the obvious example of changing 50 to 70. It wouldn't take much to entrench the concept of technological neutrality in the Copyright Act in order to, I would expect, fix what is currently wrong with the private copying regime. That's another example of a relatively easy fix.

We think there are relatively easy fixes to the language that has proven problematic for SOCAN on the charitable exemptions issue.

I would tend to agree with my friend that often less is more. I don't think we have to bring in overwhelming changes to the legislation to address what appear to be the biggest concerns of the stakeholders in the music industry.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

So in generalities, but with some very few specific payback mechanisms that are really clear—

[Gilles Daigle]

That's right. A lot of discussion earlier today, or some discussion earlier today, was on the current exemption for commercial radio stations, the so-called $1.25 million. It' a very short section. It just needs to be deleted.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

That's a good way to shorten it.

[Gilles Daigle]

It should be deleted because it represents nothing more than a subsidy that has been provided for way too long.

I hear discussion about mom-and-pop stations. Well, mom-and-pop stations' revenues are lower than the big stations. If your revenues are lower, when it comes to SOCAN and Re:Sound, it's a percentage of revenue tariff. You pay less.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Yes.

When you refer to the international ones—I'm out of time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

I was just checking to see how much time we have here. You have 30 seconds.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Just quickly, on the foreign ones, when you talk about what's happening in France, for example, does it align with what you two have just said as far as legislation...less, general?

[Gilles Daigle]

That is something I'd be happy to get back to the committee on after taking a closer look.

To be fair on some of these issues, they are ongoing. They haven't necessarily come to a landing on all of them, but we'd be happy to report on those activities as part of a document for the committee, if we may.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Please.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

Thank you.

That pretty much brings us to the end of the questioning.

I have one quick question I was hoping to ask. As we've been listening to testimony, I've heard that it has been a lot about changes to the legislation itself. One issue that had been raised when I had spoken with artists in my community was about the enforcement mechanisms, and that the best legislation in the world.... What are the enforcement mechanisms that might be needed, or are there improvements needed to that?

We really do have only a couple of minutes, but I was wondering if you have any thoughts as to whether something needs to be done on the enforcement side as well.

[Gilles Daigle]

From my perspective, the problem with enforcement is that it takes forever. If you get into a dispute, in the way that SOCAN and other collectives have, on issues such as online liability and whatnot.... I was there in 1995 when SOCAN was the first society, the first collective, to file a tariff for Internet uses of music. We were told at the time that we were crazy and that it was way too early to do so, but we thought, “You know what? We think it's going to take awhile for this to get sorted out.” We're still fighting, and we're still in the courts over whether or not we need to pay money back for ring tones that were paid for. Do you remember ring tones? Do you remember what those are? We're fighting over $13 million, being asked to pay back money that we received in 2006, because it's not clear whether we can keep it or not.

My suggestion there on enforcement is that, especially when it comes to a society like SOCAN, maybe what we need, in fact, is more flexibility to negotiate our own agreements, to have our own private discussions, and to rely on the Copyright Board only when we feel it's absolutely necessary, as opposed to being subjected to do it on a mandatory basis. But that's yet another discussion.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

Mr. Klein, you have 30 seconds.

[Jason Klein]

I would only say that, going back to the ISP discussion that we had, it's not necessarily all about remuneration, although it would certainly be nice if we could negotiate that. One of the things that has been brought up is the ability to require ISPs to issue site-blocking injunctions and that type of thing. If we could look at ISP involvement in enforcement, I think that could be a big help, too.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dabrusin]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Eglinski, for sharing your early morning TV watching with us. It was a very interesting morning.

The meeting is adjourned.