Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you.
Before beginning, I would like to acknowledge that I am speaking from the traditional territory of many nations—including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples—which is now home to many diverse first nations, Inuit and Métis peoples.
Access Copyright is a not-for-profit copyright collective that represents over 13,000 Canadian publishers, authors and visual artists. We facilitate the reuse and sharing of content by licensing copying from books, magazines, newspapers and journals to schools, universities, colleges, governments and businesses.
I would like to start by thanking the government for including in its budget commitments the extension of the term of of copyright protection to life plus 70. However, on behalf of the writers and publishers I represent, I am here to speak more specifically to the second copyright commitment made in the budget. This is the commitment to restoring a functioning marketplace for the sale and licencing of educational materials by urgently addressing the issue of massive and systematic unpaid copying of creators' works by the education sector.
Canadian creators and publishers are an indispensable part of Canada’s culture and economy.
For over a decade, the ability to sell our stories has been under constant threat. Since 2013, when their work has been copied and shared by most of the Canadian education sector, they have not been paid for its use outside of Quebec.
The issue here is the expansion of the fair dealing exception in the 2012 Copyright Modernization Act, which included uses for educational purposes, provided those uses are fair. In response to those changes, most of the education sector outside of Quebec abandoned the collective licensing system that worked to the mutual benefit of creators and publishers, as well as educators and students, for over two decades and in its place adopted self-defined copying policies that promote the widespread and systematic free copying of approximately 600 million pages of published works annually.
There is always a cost to “free”. In this case, the cost is being paid by all Canadians.
Let me explain. First, it has led to the devastation of Canada's creator and publisher communities. This in turn has led to significantly reduced investment in Canadian content for our classrooms. This is not hypothetical. Ten years of reduced investments have deprived our students and educators of new Canadian learning resources. “Free” is shortchanging the future of our education system by stifling investment in educational resources. A poorly resourced education sector affects us all.
Over the last decade, Canadian creators and publishers have been deprived of approximately $190 million in unpaid royalties under tariffs certified by the Copyright Board. The loss of these royalties, combined with the effect of free copying on primary sales of published content, has led to a reduction of investment in Canadian works and the elimination of publishing jobs. Overall, employment in the Canadian book industry has dropped by 31% since 2012. That's a loss to Canada's economy of 4,400 jobs. Several publishers have exited the education marketplace outright.
The uncertainty over the scope of fair dealing has led to a decade of litigation before the courts. Notwithstanding the years of litigation, including a trip to the Supreme Court, the uncertainty remains. Every day, I hear our members' frustration and anger about how increasingly difficult it is for them to make ends meet. What they want is what anybody would want: to be paid for their work. Ten years is an impossibly long time for anyone to wait to be paid.
The good news is that consultations on these issues have already taken place, so the government can and must act quickly. Thanks to these consultations, we have four unanimous recommendations from the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage in its 2019 “Shifting Paradigms” report. These recommendations continue to have the support of each of the opposition critics for Canadian heritage. The most important recommendation is recommendation 18, which would restore a functioning marketplace by clarifying that fair dealing should not apply to educational institutions when the work is commercially available.
The government needs to act at the earliest possible opportunity. Time is of the essence. After 10 years of not getting paid, we cannot wait any longer.
Thank you for your time. I look forward to answering your questions.