Good morning, and thanks for the invitation to present on behalf of The Writers' Union of Canada.
Our organization represents 2,100 professional authors across the country, and we chair the International Authors Forum, with over 700,000 members globally.
Copyright is core to how we as creators earn a living: Erode copyright, and you erode writers' incomes. It's that simple. Earning a living as a writer is difficult at the best of times. It's been immeasurably more difficult in the past decade, as we've seen sweeping digital disruption across the creative industries. We hear that content is king in the digital age, but the creators of that content are being paid and treated like serfs.
In 2012, Canada's authors and publishers were asked by Parliament to trust and respect a new understanding—a new model—around educational copying and fair dealing. What followed was anything but fair for writers. It's been a disaster, and our members have felt it first-hand. A recent survey of Canadian authors received almost 1,500 responses, and here's what they told us.
Authors have suffered a 27% decline in incomes in the past three years alone.
Compared to 20 years ago, we've seen our real incomes decline by 78%.
The average net income from writing is only $9,400.
Even worse, income from educational copyright royalties has declined on average by 42% in five years as a result of illegal free copying by the education sector.
In 2012, as Parliament was reforming the Copyright Act, writers knew that we faced a difficult road ahead. Not surprisingly, we've been adapting. More of our member authors are self-publishing, and the writers' union has been delivering professional development workshops on self-publishing, book promotion and publicity. Many authors are embracing entrepreneurship, yet writers are now expected to do more for less or, even worse, for nothing.
As our publishing partners can confirm, producing content isn't free. Researching, writing, rewriting, editing, graphic design, layout and distribution all cost money, yet authors are now expected to work for free for the benefit of the education sector. In fact, with recent proposed changes to the Copyright Board of Canada, our serfdom has been confirmed. The reality for Canada's writers is that the copyright board is toothless. We work for it, but it doesn't work for us. We put in the time and effort to get tariffs approved, and when they are approved, the education sector simply ignores them.
We have asked for statutory damages for our tariffs to encourage compliance by the educational institutions, but the government has declined to make that simple change. We are discouraged and disappointed by that decision.
Perhaps we should look to the Europeans on how to balance copyright, privacy and online content in the digital age. The European Parliament recently passed a directive laying out rules for how content is to be protected and paid for by giant tech platforms that have long avoided regulation. The directives require platforms and aggregators online to pay for licences for the use of content snippets.
As well, the directive imposes greater responsibility on the platforms for lawful sharing of content online, a measure that should help in the fight against content piracy and provide a new licensing opportunity to authors for the use of their work online. The Europeans are disrupting the disruptors and telling Silicon Valley that a business model built on others' free labour is unacceptable.
Another disruption from the tech sector itself could also prove valuable to creators. There's increasing talk that a new decentralized technology could allow creators to circumvent centralized platforms and connect directly to readers. The technology, called a distributed ledger or blockchain, has been around for decades and has become famous recently for powering cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Blockchain could now disrupt books.
How does the technology work? The platforms of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google are essentially gargantuan centralized relational databases. They are intermediaries controlling our relationship to readers and facilitating sales transactions.
In contrast, distributed ledger technology has no centralized authority controlling a database. Instead, transactions are stored on immutable ledgers, which are replicated on many computers across a peer-to-peer network. Since the ledger actually exists in many places, it's really hard to hack.
Transactions can be bundled into what they call digital blocks on a chain, which gives the technology its name of blockchain. For a book, these transaction blocks could be for the authorship, publishing, distribution and ultimately, the reader's purchase. The technology could have several applications for authors. It could guarantee attribution of a digital work to an author or rights holder. Through smart contracts, it could distribute and authenticate copyrighted material to readers, and via a digital wallet, it could automatically distribute royalties, directly and immediately, back to authors.
A number of tech start-ups are already using the technology to distribute content and reward creators, including blockchain publisher Publica.io, Smoogs.io, Po.et, and authorship.com. Access Copyright launched its own start-up, Prescient Innovations Lab, to build and test blockchain technology that is focused on the creator. The Writers' Union supports Access Copyright in this pioneering work.
The Writers' Union of Canada is committed to innovation and to empowering our members to adopt new technology, new skills and new business models to survive. Given the sorry state of our earnings, we have little to lose and a lot to gain.
There is possibly something promising in the new technology on the horizon to help us develop new, innovative remuneration models. However, stronger copyright is key. Fair dealing needs to be fair, not free, for educators, and we need a Copyright Board that's more than a paper tiger. Significant statutory damages will give the Copyright Board some teeth in dealing with those who refuse to pay their tariffs.
If we value culture, then we must value the work of those who produce it. The Writers' Union will submit a brief detailing the ideas I've discussed, and we're happy to take questions.
Thank you.