Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee.
I'm William Huffman, and I represent the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative, an organization with a very broad mandate but one that includes the management of copyright and permissions as it relates to Inuit artists in the region.
I'll just give you a bit of an organizational overview, to give you a sense of who we are. The West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative is the oldest and most successful of the Arctic co-operatives. There is a network across the north. The organization was created in 1959 to provide resources for Inuit artists working in the community. Since its inception, the co-operative has been responsible for making possible the iconic Inuit art of Cape Dorset. The creation and sale of Inuit art is the largest and most profitable local industry in the region.
Cape Dorset is located in the territory of Nunavut, approximately 2,091 kilometres north of this room. The head office is in Cape Dorset, and since 1976 a satellite office operates in downtown Toronto, where I am based.
We are a community-owned organization; 90% of 1400 residents in Cape Dorset are shareholders. Profits are distributed back to the community in the form of annual dividends.
What we do in the context of copyright is that we manage the copyright and reproduction permissions on behalf of Cape Dorset's living artists and artists' estates. Our system is predicated on a power of attorney and appointment of agent arrangement that we negotiate with each artist, or the artist's estate representative. We are only responsible for this community. No other organization in the Canadian Arctic has the same system sophistication that exists in Cape Dorset.
For today's forum, I should note that my office regularly receives requests from artists residing in other communities for its copyright and permissions expertise. That certainly demonstrates a need for this specialized infrastructure in Canada's Arctic region for our northern creators.
Any individual or entity wishing to reproduce, in whole or in part, the likeness of a work of art produced by a Cape Dorset artist must seek authorization from the co-operative. Our office has worked with a range of stakeholders, from museums and art galleries to corporations and government.
In light of today's forum, we have ongoing federal relationships in the context of copyright and permissions with the Bank of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mint, Canada Post, the National Gallery of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, and Global Affairs Canada, among others.
Our copyright and permissions specialist reviews the proposed use of the imagery and provides final approval on format and quality of the reproduction or depiction. The co-operative often collects a user fee based on the CARFAC copyright collective schedule and remits, minus a 20% administration fee, a dollar amount to the artist or estate. Use of imagery can relate to both print and online platforms. These can include publications, advertising initiatives and merchandising, everything from coffee mugs and umbrellas to exhibition catalogues and magazines.
Often, the approach is proactive, with requests for copyright and permissions received by my office. We then work closely with those individuals or organizations. In other circumstances, we are made aware of or we discover unauthorized image use and attempt to enforce our reproduction and fee requirements. In the case of the latter, we are often successful collecting fees and rectifying improper image use, but certainly we are limited in how aggressively we can enforce our copyright and permission terms globally.
In our 2017-18 fiscal year, we processed $137,466.78 in copyright and permission fees, remitting $109,973.73 to Cape Dorset artists and their estates.
Why do we manage this program? The artists of Cape Dorset range from the very emerging to elder creators. Many artists are challenged by a lack of home phone and Internet access. All have Inuktitut as a first language, and it is common for our more senior artists to be unilingual Inuktitut speakers. It's also common that our artists are without bank accounts and are therefore unable to accept payments under what we would consider normal circumstances.
In light of that, you can imagine how complex and challenging it is for our artists to both understand and navigate a copyright and permissions program under, again, what we would consider normal circumstances. The specific structure and administration of this copyright and permissions program by the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative makes possible a financial benefit to artists from image use while protecting the integrity of the original work by regulating and restricting its reproduction or depiction.
In closing, the distinctive structure of our organization and its collective understanding of the Inuit artist community in Cape Dorset have uniquely equipped us to manage copyright for our stakeholders.
Thank you.