Hello and thank you, committee members.
My name is Tyrone Benskin. I am here as an individual. I happen to be a member of ACTRA and sit on the ACTRA branch council. As a few of you may know, I'm also a former parliamentarian. I sat on the heritage committee and was actually a part of the committee that studied this act as it was coming into force.
I'm going to underline and reiterate something that Martin Lavallée put forward, which is to remember that the focus and point of the Copyright Act, or Loi sur le droit d'auteur as it's known in French—the right of the author, is to protect the rights of authors.
There has been an attempt to find this balance between users and authors. Although I understand where that comes from, the main focus of the Copyright Act has to be to protect the rights of the creators. Without those protections it is very hard for creators to become self-sufficient and to continue to create on their own. Creators include writers, musicians, and so forth, as well as audiovisual creators, which the Copyright Act at this point does not cover.
We need to keep the focus on those creators, on the rights of those creators, on how we can find ways to make sure they get the best use out of their products and creations, and on ensuring that consumers have the best quality and the best access to those creations.
Thank you.