Madam Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the invitation to testify before you today.
I am Arnaud Foulon, vice-president of the HMH Group and president of the Association nationale des éditeurs de livres, or ANEL. I am joined by Johanne Guay, vice-chair of publishing at Groupe Librex and chair of the Copyright Committee and Members' Rights. Our director general, Richard Prieur, is also with us.
ANEL brings together about one hundred Canadian French-language publishing houses of all sizes, in four provinces. These enterprises publish approximately 5,000 titles every year, which range from novels to how-to guides, and include scientific works, school books, art books, poetry and plays.
Historically, ANEL has always advocated for the reaffirmation and strengthening of copyright. In 2009, we presented a brief to Canadian Heritage and Industry Canada on the reform of copyright in the digital age. In 2012 we submitted several amendments in the brief we tabled with the legislative committee studying Bill C-11. None of the amendments we submitted were taken up.
We are here before you again in 2018 to discuss remuneration models for artists, at a time when technology is disrupting traditional models. Let's be clear; we are discussing the value placed today on a work as it compares to the work involved in creating, producing, and disseminating it, and ultimately, to the price the user is willing to pay to have access to it.
We wish to discuss the way in which digital and related technologies continue to change our profession, and also the changes in readers' habits and the use that is made of literary works. To that end, we will briefly touch on a few points. First, we will give you our interpretation of the impact of this law on Canadian publishers and citizens. We will then give an example of what the act did not do. Finally, we will reflect on the trade of publishing in the digital age, and we will conclude with our expectations following this exercise.
We hope that the book sector, and, more broadly, the Canadian cultural sector, will get a better hearing this time, and that your work will again give creators a legal framework that will provide them with the stability needed to innovate in the creation, production and dissemination of Canadian books. Copyright has always been and remains an economic right for the specific purpose of remunerating the work of creators and regulating the market for these products of the mind.
Since its modernization in 2012, The Canadian Copyright Act, much criticized internationally, has become the example of what not to do. This bad reputation is mostly due to the addition of several exceptions, such as the one for education. In addition to not respecting the three-step test of the Berne Convention, of which Canada is a signatory, on the production of literary and artistic works, the act has had and continues to have a significant economic impact on Canadian publishing and its authors.
Over the past five years, Access Copyright royalty distributions have dropped by 80%. In Quebec, Copibec, the collective reproduction rights management organization, has seen the university rights per student decline by 50%, and the amount collected by a rights holder per reproduced page dropped by 23%. The result is that the royalties paid to authors and publishers are in free fall, even though, paradoxically, the student population is increasing.
I will not spend too much time on the loss of income of the management companies, but I do want to mention the opposition to the book sector shown by educational institutions and student associations. That opposition, we need to point out, derives mostly from two Supreme Court decisions from 2004 and 2012. The creation of user rights, confirmed in the broad fair use exceptions in the 2012 act, particularly in education, stifled reflection on the place occupied by creators in the development of culture in our societies. Worse yet, copyright was viewed as a perverse principle that limits access to intellectual works, which is of course completely false. On the contrary, for close to fifty years, the education and publishing worlds collaborated to provide pupils and students with access to school books and a diverse, rich and high-quality national literature.