Evidence of meeting #132 for Canadian Heritage in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was content.
A recording is available from Parliament.
November 22nd, 2018 / 12:30 p.m.
Chair, Copyright Committee and Members' Rights, Association nationale des éditeurs de livres
Yes, and it is the same mostly everywhere in the country. Sometimes it is only 8%.
Liberal
Pierre Breton Liberal Shefford, QC
I am rather surprised. I don't know if my colleagues knew about this. I find that a very small percentage, but it seems to be the established practice.
Mr. Foulon, did you want to add something?
President, Association nationale des éditeurs de livres
As my colleague was saying, when we sell international rights, the royalties paid to the authors can even dip below 10%. In some cases, the size of the market seems to have an impact on the percentages paid to the authors, but in Canada and Quebec, the norm is 10%. There is an indexation clause stating that if sales increase, the author's share may reach 12% or 14%, according to the standards that are applied and the actual sales.
Liberal
Pierre Breton Liberal Shefford, QC
Ms. Guay, Mr. Foulon, I can't remember which one of you talked about piracy.
Chair, Copyright Committee and Members' Rights, Association nationale des éditeurs de livres
I did.
Liberal
Pierre Breton Liberal Shefford, QC
This is connected to the new technologies, I assume.
What impact does this have on the income of the members of your industry? What is the scope of that impact at this time?
Chair, Copyright Committee and Members' Rights, Association nationale des éditeurs de livres
No investigations have been done on this. However, we receive at least one request a week from authors whose books crop up on files like Torrent. Since I am Kim Thúy's publisher, I know that his novel Ru has been pirated repeatedly. When we see that Torrent technology has been used to download, we send a lawyer to let people know that they do not have the right to do that. People feel that our books are free and they download them very openly. We have not witnessed this as such, but one author told us that when we get a Torrent file to shut down somewhere, it reopens elsewhere almost immediately. There is no control over this. In the case of a best seller, this means that hundreds of books are not sold that would be otherwise. And in fact, the sale of digital copies has also declined a great deal in our area.
Liberal
Pierre Breton Liberal Shefford, QC
I'd like to ask the other witnesses if they have some idea of the financial scope of this issue. Ms. Guay gave us some examples.
Ms. Pendgracs, do you have some idea of what this represents?
Vice-President, Professional Writers Association of Canada
I think from the writers' perspective, our work is being stolen all the time. It's being pirated and reused, because with the Internet, people can reuse your stuff now and repurpose it. Sometimes writers get charged with plagiarism against their own work because it's reused somewhere else and the words are there. They're their words, but then when the original writer goes to remarket it, they're charged with plagiarism for using their own words.
Vice-President, Professional Writers Association of Canada
It's very difficult for individual authors to police where their work is being used.
I also wanted to respond about the cost that goes to the writer and what the writer is supposed to contribute. This is on the other topic you asked one of the panellists about.
When I did my first book back in 2001, the publisher did all the marketing and whatnot for the book. Now authors and writers are hired on the basis of their marketability—that is, their author's platform. They have to have thousands of followers on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or whatever to get a publishing contract, because the publishers no longer provide the manpower to do the marketing.
We're getting less income, but we're also having to put in more effort. We don't just write the book anymore and let it go to the publisher; we have to do all that work along the way, and we get no additional compensation for it in most cases.
Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, CPC
Thank you.
Just to continue on your idea, Ms. Pendgracs, it seems as if you have to self-market your own product and create your own author's brand.
Mr. Harnum, in your presentation you referred to fair dealing. Are you referring to what we've heard from many witnesses, which is a clarification of the fair dealing provisions related to the education sector? Is that what you were referring to—that the unintended consequence of the last revision of the Copyright Act has just created a huge loss of educational content and a loss of revenue and jobs for this sector at the same time?
Chair, Canadian Copyright Institute
It's a large list. We are all singing from the same songbook, but we are dealing with the same problems. When the copyright law was changed, I well remember the testimony of members of the Canadian Education Association, who said clearly there would be no loss to the publishing sector or the author sector from these extensions.
Exactly the opposite has happened. There has been a massive loss. An entire sector of our industry, the sector that was compensated by Access Copyright, is largely gone.
I don't blame the educators for this; they are very smart. That's why they're in universities and schools. They looked at what the law said and saw a giant hole. They drove everything through, and that's what happened.
Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, CPC
Thank you, Mr. Harnum. Our analysts are taking your comments into the recommendations. My hope is that the Liberals will listen to the testimony and fix the law. It could be done. This big omnibus bill was brought forward. We would welcome this, and we would expect to see it from the Liberals.
My next questions are for Mr. Foulon.
In your statement, you said that technology was disrupting traditional models. You also referred to the topic I raised with Mr. Harnum, which is the loss of income due to the fair use provision in the educational field. You mentioned before the meeting began the impact this has had on our francophone minorities. Can you acquaint us with the point of view of the education sector?
Also, if you have any time left, I'd like to hear your thoughts on piracy. What do you recommend we add to the Copyright Act to give it more teeth, as you said?
President, Association nationale des éditeurs de livres
You asked about a number of things.
To start, I would say our association brings together book publishers all over the country, many being French-language publishers outside Quebec. These publishers are hugely important to Canadian culture, so it's vital that they be listened to, heard and respected.
Now I'll come back to what you said about fair dealing and the drop in revenues it caused, for authors, publishers and copyright holders. Aside from allowing an open-ended definition of the term “fair” and leaving it up to the courts to resolve any disputes that arise, the current approach has not been without cost, to be sure. Publishers in Quebec and other provinces have had to spend money and hire legal advisers to enforce authors' rights.
It's important to understand something. Earlier, we talked about the costs associated with a book. A publisher's first commitment is to the author. Under the contract signed with the author, the publisher endeavours to promote the work and protect related rights. Now, though, the act has given rise to somewhat of a distortion in that the use of fair dealing by some schools has resulted in the work being disseminated outside the scope of the copyright framework we adhere to. We signed an agreement with our authors to make sure those rights are respected.
That's where the decline in revenues comes in. The fair dealing exception is used properly by some, but less so by others. This means that the work is being disseminated in parallel, if you will, mirroring the distribution of works through piracy and other phenomena my colleague Mrs. Guay talked about. We are under no illusions: piracy existed before the digital age. Although the digital world did not create piracy, it greatly amplified the problem.
Conservative
Martin Shields Conservative Bow River, AB
Thank you.
I really appreciate the input today. The Canadian Copyright Institute did an excellent job of laying out the issue and recommendations; I really appreciate that.
Here are a couple of things from an old guy. I used to read a book. I haven't actually read a book in years because I read electronic things. I used to have a lot of subscriptions, but I don't have any subscriptions anymore because I find bloggers that I like and I follow them. That's all I have time for, so I read snippets on social media. When I look at my kids and my grandkids and what they read, I see that they live in a world that was never like mine.
When you talk about this copyright, do you believe that the recommendations are for the future? Will this accommodate where we're going?
