Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members of Parliament.
I'm president of the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association, which serves as the collective voice and advocate of the major motion picture, home entertainment, and television studios. Our members include Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and Disney--in other words, the producers who make many of the films that your kids, my kids, and my grandkids are waiting to see this summer.
Canada has a serious intellectual property crime problem, and clear action to strengthen Canada's IP enforcement system is long overdue. To quote the RCMP, from a criminal enforcement perspective it is critical to recognize who's losing and who's profiting. Rights holders, legitimate retailers, the Canadian public, Canadian businesses, and the Canadian economy lose. Criminals are the ones who profit. Therefore, the CMPDA supports all the recommendations in the report you have from the CACN.
I want to focus my comments today on our most critical area of concern, which is the impact of camcordings from Canadian movie theatres on worldwide movie piracy.
Here are the facts. All movie piracy, whether DVD piracy or Internet piracy, begins with a stolen film, and today over 90% of all newly released pirated films come from movies illegally camcorded in theatres. Camcorders make a profit by selling copies to people who distribute them on the Internet and to organized criminal networks that reproduce and sell millions of illegal DVDs around the world.
How do we know this? It's because in 2003 the major motion picture studios began tracking the problem of camcording by using sophisticated watermarking of their movie prints, so that it's possible to determine through technical analysis the very theatre where camcording took place. Pirated discs from around the world and illegal copies available on the Internet are continually analyzed to determine their source, the place where the image was first stolen right off the screen. This is why we know Canada is now a major and growing source of movie piracy.
In 2006 overall, Canadian camcorders were the source of approximately 20% to 25% of all illegally camcorded films from the major motion picture studios that appeared either online or as illegal DVDs around the world.
The illegal DVDs and online copies of major releases have been traced to theatres in British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Alberta, and Quebec. Copies of those stolen films have been found on DVDs in over 45 countries and have been posted on the Internet by over 130 different so-called release groups, which are largely responsible for the online distribution of illegal copies of movies. With advances in digital technologies, believe me, these are highly organized thieves. They're using various methods to produce extremely good-quality copies, including techniques that utilize facilities for assisted listening to produce clean audio tracks in both official languages.
Despite the gravity of the problem, Canada has failed to enact specific legislation to effectively deter camcorder thieves. Under existing Canadian copyright law, there must be proof that the copy of the film being camcorded was made for commercial purposes. Professional camcord thieves know this all too well and simply claim they have made the copy for personal reasons. The fact that there is no specific anti-camcording provision in the Criminal Code has been cited by law enforcement repeatedly when they're called for assistance by theatre employees who have caught a camcorder in the act.
Camcorders, left alone by law enforcement, return time and time again. These thieves are intimidating and threatening to theatre employees, and the continued escalation of their actions is disturbing. Concern for the over 17,000 employees at theatres across Canada who are generally left to confront these thieves without law enforcement is obviously a significant issue for the Motion Picture Theatre Associations of Canada, and we're joined by MPTAC and all members of the major unions and guilds, as well as by the Canadian distributors, in asking for the government to take action to amend the Criminal Code to include camcording.
In terms of what we as an industry are doing, we've dedicated substantial resources toward pursuing educational, technological, security, and training initiatives to help fight this problem and we will continue to do so. But we cannot be successful without laws that act as a deterrent and ensure authorities to take effective action to stop movie theft and send a message that criminal activity will not be tolerated in Canada.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.