Mr. Jeneroux, you have seven minutes.
Evidence of meeting #106 for Industry, Science and Technology in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was content.
Evidence of meeting #106 for Industry, Science and Technology in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was content.
4:35 p.m.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
Perfect. Thank you very much.
I'm going to pick up right where Mr. Baylis left off on some of that, to see if we can flesh out a few more things. From what I understand, the YouTube exception, the user-generated content exception to this was largely to deal with the mashups and to allow certain pieces of songs to be included along with other songs. It wasn't necessarily how long that song was or how long that clip was, but it was essentially my understanding of why the UGC exemption was put in place.
I'm just putting that out there because where I want to get your thoughts, Mr. Long, is that YouTube now—or I guess we should just say Google—is talking about doing, essentially, an Apple Music or Spotify version here in Canada. I think YouTube Remix is what we're talking about. From my understanding, it's coming on board this year, or the intent is to come on board this year. It's in other jurisdictions. Does this help satisfy a lot of this? Will that mitigate some of your concerns?
4:35 p.m.
Executive Director, Music Nova Scotia
Potentially, but nonetheless I don't think the YouTube format, as it exists today, is going anywhere. That's where people go first to consume music for free.
4:35 p.m.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
Okay. Does something then come in to replace it? Is that what you're worried about, coming in to replace the free service?
4:35 p.m.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
I guess what I'm getting at is whether people are looking for that. Are Canadians looking for that free service? There are definitely benefits for Apple Music and Spotify; they've made that a service that people will use because it has its benefits. YouTube eats up my data if I'm streaming something, so I try not to use YouTube as much as I would download something from Apple Music.
4:35 p.m.
Executive Director, Music Nova Scotia
Can you just back that up for a second and make your point again?
4:35 p.m.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
Yes. What I'm trying to get to is this. Is there a value-add for Spotify and Apple Music?
4:35 p.m.
Executive Director, Music Nova Scotia
Okay, so the point of contention here is that a service like YouTube, where people don't have to pay anything to consume music that may or may not be paid for properly, or licensed properly, or whatever, is that it's advertising. The business model is based on advertising, and those dollars aren't being distributed fairly to the content creators.
Why is it that in Canada, with threshold broadcasters, there's an onus and legal commitment that they must abide by to reinvest advertising profits back into royalty payments, Canadian content development payments, and so on for their use and commercial exploitation of intellectual property, yet these digital companies are immune to it?
4:35 p.m.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
With the Copyright Act, the UGC exemption is for that purpose. Am I correct in saying that the intent and the understanding of the UGC exemption was for mashups?
4:35 p.m.
Executive Director, Music Nova Scotia
Yes, sure, that was one intent, but the provisions have been exploited.
4:35 p.m.
Conservative
4:35 p.m.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
Okay.
I do want to take some time to talk to you, Mr. Lorimer, getting some more information from you on what Canadian Publishers Hosted Software Solutions does. I'm curious. Which universities and post-secondary institutions are using CPHSS as a platform?
4:35 p.m.
Treasurer, Canadian Publishers Hosted Software Solutions
We're launching it as a product at the congress of the learned societies in Regina at the end of the month. It's a soft launch. Right now if you looked at the site you'd see that there are about 3,500 chapters there from about 350 different books, but we're rapidly adding content from other publishers. We're expecting to have 600 books by the end of June, and we're continuing to add content.
Between February 1 and now, we've been funded by the Ontario Media Development Corporation and Nova Scotia's creative industries fund to undertake this project. I think everybody sees that there's an issue around lack of payment for the content that's being published in Canada by Canadian academic authors for the Canadian university market, and people are anxious to see whether there's—as I said in my presentation—a middle ground.
We went and talked to universities. We approached 35 universities. Two of the universities said they would actually tell their academics that this site exists. Those two were the University of Winnipeg and the University of Toronto; but 17 of the universities refused to talk to us.
4:40 p.m.
Conservative
4:40 p.m.
Treasurer, Canadian Publishers Hosted Software Solutions
They were not interested. They said they were happy with what they're doing right now. Well, of course the universities are happy, as you heard earlier today and you've heard at other sessions. They're happy because they're not paying for the content, so they're happy. It's policy at universities about how academics are required to put together their course packs.
Anyway, we're hoping, of course, that as universities become more clear about what this offering is, they're going to see that this is a better alternative than what they're doing right now. We're not getting the warm response we were hoping for.
4:40 p.m.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
Do you guys set the price, then, of what the cost of the service would be?
4:40 p.m.
Treasurer, Canadian Publishers Hosted Software Solutions
The individual publishers put the price on each chapter of each book, just as would be the case that, when I publish a book, I put the price on it. What we've tried to do is make sure that the prices are reasonable, as I said in my presentation. The average price is 10¢ a page. Some publishers' prices are a little bit more than that; some a little bit less.
Still, the point is that the whole argument for the 10% exemption was that it's not reasonable to ask people to buy a $25 book in order to have access to one chapter of that book. Effectively, by putting that chapter on the market at a reasonable price, we think we're making it impossible to use the fair use exemption. If you can buy it for a reasonable price, how can you take it for free? How is that fair?
4:40 p.m.
Conservative
4:40 p.m.
Treasurer, Canadian Publishers Hosted Software Solutions
They set the price.
4:40 p.m.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
Each publisher would come to you and say, “I want this price.”
4:40 p.m.
Treasurer, Canadian Publishers Hosted Software Solutions
Yes, because it's a platform. Just like on Amazon, the price you pay is the price I charge Amazon less whatever the discount is they want to give you. Yes, each publisher sets the price of the book and the chapters in that book.
4:40 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy
Thank you very much.
We're going to move to Mr. Masse. You have seven minutes.
4:40 p.m.
NDP
Brian Masse NDP Windsor West, ON
Thank you for being here.
Mr. Lorimer, obviously there must have been considerable consensus to help create the motivation for the website you now have and the process. How long ago did that begin? Can you give us a little background on that?
I did go to your site, but regardless of the situation, it's obvious it's a response to something, and it has extensive contributors. Perhaps you can tell us the genesis of that. I'd be curious as to what brought about the unification to create that.