Yes, if you don't mind.
Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee, for inviting me to this meeting. My name is Paul Verhaegh, and I'm the regional director for the Prairies and the north of the Professional Writers Association of Canada, PWAC, a Canadian association for people who have made writing their profession.
Copyright is a crucial instrument for our members. Without copyright they would not have any ownership in what they produce. In such a situation, writing professionally would be an unpaid hobby instead of a way to make a living.
Two issues are of particular concern to our members. First, there is the fair dealing rule in the Copyright Act for educational institutions. It is our opinion that the fair dealing exception for educational institutions has been abused at the expense of both publishers and authors.
We warn that this exception could not be limited to a fair quotation exception. A fair quotation exception would mean that reproducing parts of an existing work is acceptable to support or illustrate a point made in an educational text, and should not constitute the point of such a text. Copying more than a few pages of an existing work, let alone a whole chapter of a book, should be excluded from the exception and should give rise to payment of compensation. Turning copyright into a “right to copy” undermines the publishing industry and destroys the writing profession.
The second point is whether or not to extend the copyright protection from 50 to 70 years after the death of the creator. In many countries this has been done already, but not in Canada—at least, not yet. PWAC tends to favour the extension.
Some will argue that such an extension only benefits the heirs of the creator and not the creator himself or herself. We don't see why that would be a reason not to extend the copyright protection, since in our society it is the rule and not the exception that heirs benefit from what a deceased person created and produced during his or her lifetime.
Last, I would make a remark in general about copyright legislation. We live in times of rapid technological developments, and the pace at which new technologies appear will not slow down. Laws, including copyright laws, will only last if such laws are functional enough to make room for future developments in technology. Therefore, PWAC says: accept and embrace technological change, but do protect the ownership rights of creators.
Thank you very much.