Industry Committee on May 7th, 2018

[James Lorimer]

As you have heard from other witnesses, my company and pretty well every Canadian publisher that publishes academic books found that after the universities decided to use the 10% for free approach, the revenues that we were getting from the university market for the use of our chapters in course packs went down very rapidly. Somebody today was quoting Stats Canada numbers saying that revenues from Access Copyright were down by 1%. When Terrilee Bulger said that her firm's experience was a dramatic—she said 10 times, it went from $30 to $3,000 in revenue—my own experience isn't that dramatic.

In my Toronto company, our revenues went from about $40 to about $10. It was across the Canadian publishing community. Our revenues from university use did decline substantially as soon as the Copyright Act was in place and the universities decided to interpret the fair use thing to say that they could take stuff for free for 10% and not pay Access Copyright. That took place in 2012, 2013, 2014. You could see the numbers coming down. At the Frankfurt book fair in 2015, a group of us were talking about the fact that there was this obvious problem but there was also a need for university professors to have better digital access to the books that we're publishing and to be able to find out about what kind of content there is in the books that we're publishing. This platform is not just a way of selling, it's also a way for university professors to find books and find material that they don't know exists and that they can use in their courses. The reason it's taken us three years to put it together has a lot to do with developing the software that makes that possible, because we couldn't find any software in the world that supported this particular approach to making books available digitally on a platform where lots of books were aggregated together but where they could be searched at the chapter level. I don't want to get into—

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

No, it is technical. I did go on your site. You can only go so far without registering.

[James Lorimer]

You should register. It's free.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

I was listening to your testimony at the same time, but yes, I will. I thought it was interesting. My background is sociology, history, and I have a PSW. What I thought was interesting was the broad range of ways you could see what students in British Columbia were taking from Ontario or so forth. It probably could benefit from even a Canadian publishers and authors type of a system in the future.

I'm going to move to you, Ms. Bear Nicholas, with regard to your situation. We don't have very many witnesses who are begging for a lawsuit to take place. Maybe you should give us an update. How is it the Copyright Act failing you so poorly right now that this seems to be your best recourse for your situation? I think that's telling in itself. I happen to be one of the few non-lawyer politicians.

[Prof. Andrea Bear Nicholas]

Nothing has really changed in the sense that we're going to keep publishing and we're working on a second book right now, which is mostly done. We are hoping that copyright laws will be beneficial to us down the road and that we will not have to surrender copyright simply because these elders don't understand what this academic is doing when they're taping them. That's really the problem. By the time I got into the picture, most of the elders who had told these stories had passed away, so we couldn't even ask how they were.... We're talking 40 or 45 years ago in some cases, the early ones. Now, the situation as far as we know has not changed at all and we expect that the family could get their act together and decide to come after us. We published one book already and, as I said, we've probably got another 10 books to go, easily.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

The challenge we're hearing right now—we've heard this from university professors, universities and others—is there seems to be a consensus that aboriginal and native content has been taken advantage of for far too long, but nobody quite understands how we create a system for compensation in recognition that deals with the fact that the law is so rigid in terms of that.

Do you have any thoughts about what the next step is? There seems to be broad-based recognition that the status quo is simply untenable and there's no justice in it, but nobody seems to really know what to do about that under the current Copyright Act.

[Prof. Andrea Bear Nicholas]

I think basically, our storytellers shouldn't lose any claim to the stories. That's the most fundamental issue here, which is what we are still struggling against.

We haven't thought ahead in terms of compensation for our stories, except for the fact that we know that if we were to publish our stories, there would be money coming in for that work. We view our stories as kind of collectively owned. Under the current system, that's a little bit of a different way of looking at things, but certainly a community ought to be able to say, “These are our stories, and if money is to be made off those stories, that that should come to us.” I think it's quite simple in that sense. I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not very up on how the copyright law works for others, but we know it hasn't worked for us.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Exactly. It's a question of how to get to that solution.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

We'll move on to Mr. Jowhari. You have seven minutes.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Welcome, presenters. Thank you for sharing your insights with us.

I want to start with Mr. Lorimer. You talked about the middle ground. You specifically said that, had you had more time, you would have shared with us the responses from universities, and you briefly touched on it when one of my colleagues was asking you a question. Can you expand on your experience of course packages, 10¢ a page, sharing it with the university, and how well it was embraced by each university. I understand there is a coalition of five universities. Can you name those for us, or did I misunderstand?

[James Lorimer]

We're a group of five publishers: Between the Lines, which is a Toronto-based publishing company; Irwin Law, which is a small, independent law book publishing company in Toronto; Fernwood Publishing, which I mentioned, in Black Point and Winnipeg; my own company, Formac Publishing, in Halifax; and my company, Lorimer, in Toronto.

What I was reporting was that we hired a copyright officer liaison person who, with the help of Nova Scotia's creative industries fund, was able to travel across Canada. She asked for meetings with 35 different universities to talk to the copyright officers and to explain how the site works, and why it's an alternative to taking material for free. She also met with university bookstores to explain how the model that we're following is exactly what they already do with respect to books. So it was to reassure everybody that this is a reasonable way to get access to a wide range of published material at reasonable prices and in an easy way. I have the list here.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

We have Dalhousie here, and we had UNB before. Did you specifically talk to them, and what was their response?

[James Lorimer]

Yes. The response from Dalhousie was that they weren't interested in meeting with us about this initiative. We didn't go to Fredericton. In Halifax, we did meet with Mount Saint Vincent, , and we did meet with Acadia, which is in Wolfville, but we were declined by the other three.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Fair enough.

Where do the creators of the content fit into the middle ground? You talked about the publishers. You talked about the universities. You talked about these course packs. I get it.

Why would the middle ground only include the publishers and the universities but not the content creators, and how is that helping the content creators, especially Canadian content creators?

[James Lorimer]

The way it works is that when an author comes to me and I publish his book, my job is to get that book out into as many people's hands as possible, to promote the book, and to create awareness. When I sell the book, I pay royalties to the author. All of the publishing companies operate in the same way, so in this case, if I sell a copy of a book to you, revenue flows back to the author in the form of royalties.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Do you believe that this middle ground will increase the revenue flowing back to the content creator?

[James Lorimer]

Oh, yes, absolutely.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. Long, I want to go back to your second recommendation, which was to repeal section 68.1 and the $1.25 million radio royalty revenue.

If I understood you correctly, and you can correct me if I did not understand you correctly, you are saying the majority of the smaller players have been bought by the larger players. The larger players are benefiting from this, and the small players are not benefiting from it, therefore this is not fairly distributed.

By repealing that, what happens to some of the small operators in a remote and rural area, that aren't part of that large corporation?

[Scott Long]

I guess subsection 68.1, as it is written now, was meant to protect some of those small, rural stations at the time, the mom-and-pop shop radio stations, obviously.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

I have one in my riding and they're not making $1.25 million, I can assure you.

[Scott Long]

Exactly.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

They're not part of a big corporation so how would you—

[Scott Long]

No, but the recommendation we're making is that it would be scalable and ability to pay would be taken into consideration.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

So it's not a complete repeal, it's scalable.

Can you give me your thoughts on the—

[Scott Long]

It would need to be negotiated, whether it's the Copyright Board...and with rights holders. I don't want to say what those rates should be.

A complete repeal would be the wrong use of language, as you pointed out, but we're definitely sympathetic to the small, independent-owned radio stations and believe concessions should be made so they would not be negatively affected.