Good evening. Thank you for having me.
My name's Julien Bidar and I'm President of Les Éditions Outloud. Outloud is a publishing company created four years ago. Our mission is to develop and promote the creation of Canadian content. As a publisher, we depend directly on the Copyright Act and the environment that act creates for us. To cite Ministers Joly and Bains, [translation] "an effective copyright system should foster a market and an environment in which all users have access to content [... while] allowing creators to turn their successes into a way of making a living." As such, I've noted several inefficiencies in the Copyright Act as it's currently written.
The first point raised previously was related to dysfunctions of the Copyright Board Canada; I can't spend too much time on that. Several possible solutions were raised in the recommendations by the coalition for a Canadian music policy.
The second point is related to the importance of modernizing the Copyright Act to make it consistent with the market and users' consumer habits. I find that there are two important points in this regard. The first is related to private copying. I wonder how it's conceivable that the private copy system has stopped collecting royalties on blank CDs and DVDs, when music is no longer really consumed on those media and has evolved to the use of cellular phones and iPods, for example. In my view, the argument that the cost would be passed on to the consumer if royalties were collected on those media is not really valid because a European study has shown that a cellular telephone sells at the same price whether or not a royalty is collected. The second point is related to intermediaries; we have already discussed this at length. It would be good to find a solution in this regard.