Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the members of the committee for having us.
My name is David Caron. I am the president of the Ontario Book Publishers Organization. I'm also president and co-publisher at ECW Press here in Toronto.
Also here is Holly Kent, executive director of the OBPO.
We represent more than 40 Ontario-based, Canadian-owned book publishers, companies that provide the risk capital and the creative partnerships to publish and print audio and digital for hundreds of Canadian authors every year in all genres to readers around the world.
Copyright is at the heart of our businesses and at the heart of our relationships with our authors, and those have been damaged by the Copyright Modernization Act. You've heard in general the kind of effect the act has had. I want to tell you some specific stories about publishers in Ontario.
I have a publisher from southwestern Ontario who has seen a loss of $50,000 per year in revenue and has been forced to develop scholarly books for the American market in order to survive as a business.
I have a publisher in Toronto who saw a loss of $90,000 per year and whose author walked into a classroom where they were studying her Governor General's award-winning novel, but all the copies were photocopied without compensation.
I have a university-based publisher who has seen a drop of $65,000 per year in revenue because the institutions it works with believed that one library copy equals unlimited course use.
I have a literary publisher who has lost $39,000 per year in sales, a sizable chunk of its annual revenue; a legal publisher who is now missing $55,000 of its sales; and a children's publisher who has seen a decrease of $195,000 per year.
In our own case at ECW, I can tell you that we've lost $102,000 per year in educational course adoption revenue on average versus our loss last year, which was $28,000. In other words, that revenue made the difference between being in the red and our profitability.
There are similar stories across our membership, and I don't want to go into all of them, but you get the picture.
It's not just the fact that the direct revenue through Access Copyright from educational institutions has dropped by almost 90%; it's that the private companies that service those institutions, specifically companies that offer digital content subscriptions and that used to carry our material, have now stopped paying for that content. A significant portion of our revenue, half of it in the case of our company, would have been paid out to our authors, so not only do we lose, but our authors lose as well.
A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers concludes that $30 million in licensing revenue alone has been lost, not to mention additional losses from book purchases, because educational institutions opt for free copying rather than buying books.
The Writers' Union of Canada reported that 80% of authors' revenue from educational use has disappeared.
As a publisher, if I use an author's work in another book, I can only use the minimum that I need in order to discuss that writing. Even then, I cannot use an amount that would affect the commercial value of that writing. I cannot affect the revenue of the original book. That is fair dealing for us. Yet clearly from our examples, the educational copying without compensation has affected the revenue of copyright holders.
The facts of unclear copying have been tested in the Federal Court through the York University case and have come before the Copyright Board. The interpretation of the Copyright Modernization Act by Canada's schools, colleges, and universities has created a perception of free access that goes beyond those legal limits and has created significant damage for Ontario publishers and the authors with whom they partner.
We ask that you clarify fair dealing for education and end unfair copying; promote a return to collective licensing in the education sector—there exists a reasonable means to negotiate a fair price between institutions and the creative sector—increase statutory damages to discourage systemic infringement; and ensure that we meet our international treaty obligations.
As Ontario publishers, we are ready to look at systems that provide copyrighted materials in digital, audio, and print media searchable by educators. The OBPO is involved even now in an online project to make it much easier for educators to access learning resources for our books. Fair payment for the intellectual property used in our classrooms is not only right and relatively cheap—as you've heard, it costs only a few dollars—it also invests in our future as a nation.
Our copyright-reliant professionals and industry should be growing. They should not be shrinking. They should be contributing to our nation, not looking to produce outside our borders. Students should be seeing that they could make a living in the creative and copyright-reliant professions, not that such pursuits are deemed worthless.
Thank you. I welcome your questions.