Thank you.
Thank you for the invitation to appear today. My name is Roanie Levy and I am president and CEO of Access Copyright, a not-for-profit copyright collective. I will be sharing my time today with professional writer Sylvia McNicoll. She will provide you with a creator's account of the current copyright challenges.
For 30 years, Canadian creators and publishers of trade books, textbooks, journals, newspapers and magazines have licensed the copying of parts of their works through Access Copyright. We manage these rights at Access Copyright in the same way that Copibec does, as just explained by Frédérique.
As explained by Frédérique, collective licensing is a practical and efficient model to administer rights. For a reasonable fee, educators and students have legal access to content, with the assurance that creators and publishers are paid for its use. For over 20 years this model has worked. Access Copyright distributed almost $450 million to writers, visual artists and publishers.
Unfortunately, changes to the Copyright Act in 2012 have had devastating consequences. The education sector made a unilateral decision to interpret fair dealing as free copying when they decided to stop paying for the use of over 600 million pages a year and instead rely on so-called fair dealing guidelines. That's 600 million pages that creators and publishers are no longer receiving compensation for.
Royalties collected by Access Copyright from the education sector have declined by 89% since 2012. Historically, these royalties represented 20% of the creators' writing income and 16% of publishers' profits. This is an estimated loss of $30 million a year in licensing royalties to creators and publishers, and notably this amount does not include the loss in primary sales due to the substitution effect of free content copied under the education sector's copying policies.
When we reference the 600 million pages that are copied for free, it's important for the committee to understand what we are referring to. These pages are not, as the education sector would have you believe, licensed scholarly journals. They are not open-access content or material written only by salaried academics. The 600 million copies in question are items like short stories, novels, poems, essays, children's stories and Canadian textbooks, all items that were previously paid for under Access Copyright licences and that continue to be copied today.
In 2017 the Federal Court unequivocally concluded that York University's guidelines and practices are not fair. They are not fair, as the court says, in either their terms or their application. In other words, the words on the page and the way they are used are not fair. York's guidelines are virtually identical to the copying guidelines and practices adopted by educational institutions across Canada outside of Quebec. The court found clear evidence of the substitutive impact of copying and the corresponding direct and adverse effect on creators and publishers.
I must emphasize that this is a matter of public interest. If you believe Canadian culture is important, you must ensure that creators and publishers are fairly compensated when their works are used. Fair compensation does not limit access as the education sector argues. Rather, it ensures that creators can continue to do what they do best: writing, researching, designing and publishing the Canadian stories and texts that are essential to Canadian students at all levels.
Despite these challenges, I remain optimistic, because there are two things that the federal government can do to remedy the situation.
First, clarify that fair dealing does not apply to educational institutions when the work is commercially available. This will ensure creators are justly compensated for the use of their works and reduce costly litigation, the expense of which is largely borne by creators.
Second, harmonize statutory damages. We were disappointed to see the recent reforms to modernizing the Copyright Board did not extend statutory damages to all collectives. Ensuring that all collectives have access to statutory damages through harmonization of the provisions that are already in the act will make the Copyright Board's certified tariffs meaningful and ensure that writers and visual artists are paid when their works are copied.
There is no rationale that justifies why musicians and songwriters should have the means to ensure that they are paid for the use of their works while authors and visual artists do not.
Ultimately we all share the same goal for all creators: to enable creators to get paid properly and on time.
Thank you.