I am going to discuss what the 2012 act did not accomplish.
As ANEL mentioned recently in its testimony before the Standing committee on Industry, Science and Technology, that law did not manage to curtail piracy. Not only is it proliferating, but the tools put in place to frighten the offenders are not effective. By leaving the burden of proof with the violated rights holder, by minimizing sanctions and by imposing a simple notification regime, and a requirement of notification for Internet service providers, the legislator did not fulfil its mandate, as shown by the increase in publishers' legal expenses to defend their authors. The government has to tighten the rules to fight piracy, or at the very least, broaden the private copy regime to reading and content-sharing devices.
The legislator must ensure that Canadians are made aware of the need to respect copyright, and of the use they can make of works, especially when they are in digital form. Systematically the terms “accessibility” and “free of charge” are confused. However, even though accessibility is a false problem, the lack of fees is completely illusory: the user purchases an increasing number of electronic devices and software programs, whose short shelf life forces periodic reinvestment, and the user also has to subscribe to an increasing number of online services.
Priorities are shifting from the content to the containers, and the value of goods is moving from the content to the technologies to access that content, and this contributes to the devaluation of cultural goods, and to the loss of income of the rights holders. While the cost of subscribing to these technological services is increasing, the sale of books is decreasing.
The Canada Book Fund data show a decrease in the net sales of Canadian works of more than $63 million between 2010 and 2017, with an important drop between 2011 and 2013 of more than $41 million. For the francophone publishing sector alone, there was a decrease of $30 million. In Quebec, data from the Observatoire de la culture et des communications du Québec indicate a drop of more than $119 million in the total sale of new books between 2010 and 2017.
I will now address the digital shift in the publishing world.
Today, we publish both paper format and digital works, and we are increasingly exploring the production and commercialization of audio and multimedia books. These new formats require both internal adaptation in our publishing houses, and a financial investment, and this is also the case for the other actors in the book publishing sector.
Publishers note that the digital shift requires reinvestment that is not at all offset by an increase in revenue. Many feel that the part of the value chain that returns to them does not correspond to the amount of work they do. That reinvestment is not only required by the creation of digital books and the development of new skills, but is also due to the new marketing practices for the paper book in the digital world.
You must understand that the financial risk taken by the publisher is assumed by the publisher; the publisher is the one who pays. For a digital production, the average salaries in the cultural sector are a far cry from those in the technological sector. The book industry should not be defined by a format, but judged on the value of its contents and on its capacity to create them; that is our trade.
On that point, I would like to add a word on the will of departments of Education to make schools and other educational institutions increasingly digital.