Thank you, Madam Chair, Vice-Chairs and members of the committee.
My name is Dave Forget and I'm the national executive director of the Directors Guild of Canada. With me today is Samuel Bischoff, the Guild's public policy manager.
We appreciate the committee's invitation to discuss remuneration models for artists and creative industries. In a period of significant disruption and transition to digital platforms, authors are often forgotten and left behind, while they are at the heart of a robust, innovative and successful screen-based industry. We commend the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage for having launched this review on remuneration models to ensure fair and equitable compensation for creators.
The Directors Guild of Canada is a national labour organization representing key creative and logistical professionals in the film, television and digital media industries. Today, we have approximately 5,000 members in 47 occupations covering all areas of direction, design, production, logistics and editing. Twenty years ago, in 1998, the Directors Guild founded the Directors Rights Collective of Canada, a collecting society that administers foreign royalty payments from copyright legislation in other jurisdictions and distributes those earnings to Canadian directors working in all genres. In 2017, the DRCC paid out $796,000 in foreign royalties to its membership of 1,349 Canadian directors. Since 2001, the DRCC has paid out over $10 million.
We understand that the committee's mandate is to review remuneration models and the opportunities from new access points for artists and creative industries in the context of the Copyright Act. The DGC is proposing a simple amendment to the act to confirm that the screenwriter and director are first copyright owners and presumed co-authors of audiovisual content. Recognition within the act is a fundamental step to ensuring fair remuneration for creators, and doing so would also provide greater economic clarity in the marketplace, including as we transition to new business models based on digital distribution systems.
Moreover, the current version of the act and the recent legal rulings and interpretations are consistent with this definition, which makes this change a natural extension of the existing text.
The DGC's proposed amendment would be simple to implement and wouldn’t require any further changes to more fundamental sections of the act. The modifications would be focused on section 34.1 of the act, which is responsible for the ambiguity regarding authorship. More importantly, this change wouldn't affect the status of the producer of a cinematographic or audiovisual work, wouldn't disrupt the existing economic framework, and wouldn't have an impact for other categories of authors.
Authorship is a central concept in the Copyright Act. Historically, writers and directors have been considered co-authors in Canada. This fact is supported by common industry practices and is reflected in our collective agreements with producers' organizations. These collective agreements were negotiated by the DGC and other organizations representing directors and screenwriters, such as the Writers Guild of Canada, the Association des réalisateurs et réalisatrices du Québec and the Société des auteurs de radio, télévision et cinéma, in order to outline the terms and conditions governing compensation for talent and the future use of their work. These agreements also provide for the transfer of moral rights in the productions and authorize commercial exploitation.
This transfer of rights implicitly recognizes the screenwriter and director status of co-authors and first copyright owners. Moreover, broadcasters, distributors and other investors would not finance a production without the certainty that they had secured the rights necessary to fully exploit the economic benefit.
This transfer also acknowledges that producers are disposing of existing rights and are the logical second holders. This “chain of rights“, as we call it, is not only in line with the existing interpretation of the courts but is the product of collective agreements and contracts in our industry.