Industry Committee on May 10th, 2018

[Alexis Kinloch, Public Art Project Manager, Winnipeg Arts Council]

I am Alexis Kinloch, and I am an employee of the Winnipeg Arts Council.

I'd like to acknowledge that we're on the original lands of the Anishinaabek, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

It's crucial that the government work closely with indigenous communities to make room in these laws for indigenous arts practices and knowledge-sharing to be recognized in a way that is decided by indigenous people and is respected and protected in the law. I urge you to make that a key priority throughout this review.

I've been a visual artist and writer for 14 years and I've worked in arts administration for eight years.

I thank you for the opportunity to speak about copyright and how it impacts artists. I would like to note, for the record, that I find it extremely problematic and scary that such an important public review was announced only two weeks before the event and that the invitation to speak came only two days before the engagement, leaving very little time to prepare.

Copyright is an important source of income for visual artists as they get paid when their works are exhibited, reproduced, or copied for classroom use. This becomes important because visual artists earn far less than the average Canadian, and three changes to the act could help improve their income potential.

For several years, CARFAC, the national association of visual artists, has been advocating for an artist's resale right, a royalty that artists receive when their work is resold publicly. They recommend that artists should receive 5% on future eligible sales. It is common for artists to sell their work cheaply early in their careers, and usually, if that work increases in value later and is resold, they are not paid. For example, Inuit artist Kenojuak Ashevak's famous print, The Enchanted Owl, originally sold for $24 and was later resold for over $58,000, for which she received nothing.

The resale right has been around for almost 100 years and it has been adopted by at least 93 countries.

Another change that artists are asking for relates to the exhibition right, which mandates that museums pay fees to artists when their work is exhibited publicly. Currently public museums and galleries are not legally required to pay fees to artists if their work was made before June 8, 1988, the date on which the right was enacted. It was argued that it minimized the financial impact that the new right could have, particularly for works in museum collections. However, this has led to discrimination against senior artists, as they are not always paid when their work is exhibited. This discrimination could be a charter issue. The exhibition right should apply to the normal term of copyright, the life of the artist and their estate, for 50 years after death.

The third request from artists is to place some limitations on the fair dealing changes that were made in 2012. Fair dealing has implications for all disciplines in the arts. Each year art works and publications are copied for use in schools, and visual artists are paid for those copies, but many universities are no longer renewing licences for that use, believing that they no longer have to because of fair dealing. The act doesn't specifically define what is fair, and while lawyers battle it out, artists' incomes are eroding. Between 2013 and 2017, payments to visual artists from Access Copyright declined by 66%. In 2012, we were told that changes to fair dealing would not have a significant effect on artists, but these numbers say otherwise.

We are not asking to get rid of fair dealing, but the education exception should not apply when it is possible to license work that is commercially available from a copyright collective or rights holder. This is how it works in the U.K., and we would like to see a similar model adopted in Canada.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Thank you very much.

Before we move on, on another point, please talk more slowly. We do have translators and we are recording everything. Because this is for the House of Commons we must have French and English, so as you're speaking, it's automatically being translated in the back.

[Alexis Kinloch]

I was trying to get in a lot of information in a short time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

I know. That's why I gave you an extra couple of minutes. Thank you.

We're going to move to Ms. Sharon Parenteau, from the Manitoba Metis Federation. You have the floor, please.

[Sharon Parenteau, General Manager, Manitoba Metis Federation Inc.]

Thank you.

Good afternoon. My name is Sharon Parenteau. I am the General Manager of Louis Riel Institute, the culture and education arm of the Manitoba Metis Federation. We would like to thank you for providing us with an opportunity to present to the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology as part of the five-year review of the Copyright Act.

We recommend that the committee consider an alternative approach to dealing with Métis cultural property and develop substantive changes to the Copyright Act to protect Métis cultural property.

The Métis nation has a proud heritage with a distinct culture. Property stemming from Métis culture can include traditional indigenous knowledge. Iconic images of the Métis, appropriating Métis artistic cultural expression, and representations of the Legislative Assembly of Assiniboia are three key examples of Métis cultural property.

The use of Métis cultural symbols without the consent of the Métis nation and the abuse of Métis history, and identity theft, are key concerns in the protection and continuance of Métis culture for generations to come. The protection of Métis cultural property is complex and disparate, and will require expenditure of Métis resources to address. The Manitoba Metis Federation has developed the Manitoba Métis community research ethics protocol to protect the citizens of the Métis nation by ensuring that research involving the Manitoba Métis community is culturally appropriate and considers the distinction of the Métis nation. The MMCREP is an act of self-government to protect and promote the culture, history, values, collective rights, and interests of Métis citizens.

The MMCREP generates a centralized research protocol where the MMF home office is the first point of contact for external and internal researchers. Researchers work closely with the MMF to direct them to departments, affiliates, regions, and locals in the context of their projects, thus ensuring that the Manitoba Métis community's cultural, historical, and intellectual property is appropriately reflected and preserved.

Current copyright laws do not fully protect Métis cultural property rights. For example, fixation does not protect oral knowledge handed down from generation to generation. Works that have not been fixated in a tangible form of expression are not protected under the Copyright Act. Since fixation is one of the prerequisites of copyright protection, this limitation allows expropriation of traditional knowledge.

Advocacy through appropriate political channels is required to align Canada's intellectual property regime with the cultural property rights of the Métis nation. There are two ways through which this could be achieved: a self-government agreement affording the Métis nation the authority to legislate to protect its cultural property, and legislation to directly address one or more of the intellectual property issues specifically from a Métis perspective and context.

There are existing Métis nation protocols that have been established by the MMF that are based on traditional knowledge handed down from generation to generation. The MMF has taken this traditional knowledge, such as the traditional harvesting methods described in the MMF's Métis laws of the hunt, traditional land use teachings, which the MMF collects in its traditional land use knowledge studies, and the original Métis names for landmarks and historical communities. These and other protocols are documented in Louis Riel Institute publications.

We define traditional knowledge as the body of knowledge shared by indigenous people and held by and transmitted between indigenous representatives that supports traditional land use for the benefit and well-being of indigenous peoples. Similarly, people come to understand the ecology of their surrounding environment through years of first-hand experience and inherent cultural understandings of relationships between humans, animals, lands, and water. People also come to understand the ecology of their environment through teachings that have been passed down through relations or within a community. This type of knowledge is often referred to as traditional ecological knowledge.

Existing traditional knowledge is carried by the knowledge keepers of the community, through oral transmission. There are fewer knowledge keepers and citizens who can speak the traditional language of Michif, making it difficult to preserve and revitalize.

An alternative way to preserve the oral history and knowledge is to recreate it in different forms. While the MMF has made considerable efforts collecting and using traditional knowledge for ecological purposes, the artistic community has only begun to explore this issue. In the age of digitization, artistic cultural expression is often appropriated by others with no safeguards.

Changes to the Copyright Act need to give the Métis nation the authority to legislate and protect its Métis cultural property. Our traditional knowledge is usually transmitted orally, through storytelling. Using the Manitoba Métis community research ethics protocol ensures researchers are working with the Manitoba Métis community to gather and protect Métis cultural property. Research gathered is subsequently housed in the Métis knowledge base, and is protected by the Manitoba Métis Federation, which is the governing body for the Manitoba Métis community.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Thank you very much.

I want to welcome our new guest, Camille Callison, indigenous services librarian, and Ph.D. candidate from the University of Manitoba. We're going to give you a chance to acclimatize.

We're going to jump right to Dr. Lynn Lavallee. You have up to seven minutes, please.

[Dr. Lynn Lavallee, Vice-Provost Indigenous Engagement, University of Manitoba, As an Individual]

Dr. Lavallée, sorry.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

I'm sorry.

[Dr. Lynn Lavallée]

That's okay. I typically don't put my title. I try to be humble, but I got lectured by an elder once to ensure that I use it.

[Witness speaks in Ojibwe]

My name is Dr. Lynn Lavallée. I'm currently the Vice-Provost for Indigenous Engagement at the University of Manitoba. I'm an associate professor with expertise in the area of indigenous research ethics.

While a faculty member at Ryerson University in Toronto, I served for over a decade on the university's research ethics board, the REB. In my final four years, I was its chair.

I'm coming to you as an Anishinaabe person who understands traditional knowledge and ceremony from my own limited perspective, while also understanding the importance of promoting creativity and innovation with respect to research and the Copyright Act.

I would like to speak to the tensions I have witnessed with respect to indigenous knowledges and ethical research with indigenous peoples. What I will share is not new and has been discussed for well over a decade. However, we are still having these conversations, which indicates we have not achieved an appropriate balance with respect to indigenous knowledges, intellectual property, and copyright. I hope my involvement here today is not to simply check a box so as to ensure consultation with indigenous peoples, but to achieve further progress in the area of protecting indigenous knowledges, particularly as it relates to research and copyright.

Marlene Brant Castellano has defined indigenous knowledge as traditional teachings being passed down through the generations, empirical research being gathered over time, for instance, observing how medicines can alleviate certain illnesses—and when she says “medicines”, she means traditional medicines—and spiritual knowledge gained through dreams and revelations. Marie Battiste talks about indigenous knowledge as not being a binary of western knowledge, and Willie Ermine speaks of the ethical space between indigenous knowledge and western knowledge, with this ethical space overlapping. This is the space in which we need to do more work to protect indigenous knowledge.

The Copyright Act not only allows for the appropriation of indigenous knowledge but, as Younging has stated, it also opens the door for the legalized theft of indigenous knowledge, because copyright gives copyright to the person who has collected the information. Even though intellectual property is defined as “creations of the mind”, when a researcher speaks to indigenous people, whether they're elders or traditional knowledge holders, the knowledge that is shared is ultimately the creation of the mind of the person sharing the knowledge, yet copyright goes to the collector of the information.

Complicating that even further, some of our indigenous knowledge is not seen as the creation of the mind of the individual. Oftentimes, the knowledge is passed down through the generations, as Sharon has stated. It is not the creation of one person's mind, so intellectual property does not translate for indigenous knowledge. We cannot own indigenous knowledge; it is not our intellectual property as an individual, so for me this is a foundational tension between indigenous knowledge and western knowledge, copyright, and intellectual property.

With respect to indigenous knowledge, copyright is contributing to the need to protect indigenous knowledge and not share it.

As you know, article 11 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples states that we need to “redress through effective mechanisms...cultural, intellectual, religious and spiritual property taken without...free, prior and informed consent or in violation of...laws, traditions and customs.”

I want to add that, given the Copyright Act and that academic institutions defer to it, informed consent is not being obtained because of the conflict between what is stated in the Copyright Act and the federal guidelines used by research ethics boards to review research protocols involving people.

Academic institutions are required to have any research involving people undergo an ethical review via their respective research ethics board. REBs implement the federal guidelines, the tri-council policy statement on ethical conduct for research involving humans, otherwise known as the TCPS. The TCPS underwent major revisions in 2010, with chapter 9 focusing on ethical conduct in research with first nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples.

The chapter discusses the importance of community engagement throughout the entire process of the research, from the inception of the research idea to dissemination of the findings. It articulates that the research practices should be guided by a respect for and accommodation of first nations, Inuit, and Métis priorities on joint ownership of the products of research, and maintaining access to data for a community. The TCPS also notes that we should defer to the applicable federal, provincial, and territorial legislation, namely the Copyright Act, which gives copyright to the collector of the information, not the creator or the keeper of that knowledge.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Thank you very much.

Finally we have Camille Callison. You have up to seven minutes.

[Camille Callison, Indigenous Services Librarian, Ph.D. candidate, University of Manitoba, As an Individual]

Thank you.

My name is Camille Callison and I am honoured to be here today presenting to the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology. Thank you for the opportunity to join you today, and thank you to the committee members for the important work that you do on behalf of all Canadians, including indigenous Canadians, first nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples of Canada.

I also want to acknowledge the elders, my fellow panellists, and all the good people gathered here today.

I am honoured to be here today in this historic gathering place where the Red and Assiniboine rivers meet, currently known as The Forks, and to be a guest living here in Treaty 1 territory within the heart of the Red River Métis homeland known as Winnipeg.

My name is Camille Callison and I am from the Crow clan, the Tsesk iye, of the Tahltan Nation located in northern B.C., Yukon and Alaska. I'm presenting here today as an individual, so I wanted to introduce myself.

As my late grand uncle Robert Quock taught me, we belong to the land, so it's important for me no matter where I am to acknowledge where I come from. We are the people of the Stikine River, Canada's Grand Canyon, and the home of the sacred headwaters where the Stikine, Skeena and Nass headwaters flow from, creating northwest B.C.'s biggest salmon-producing rivers.

On October 18, 1910, also known to us as Tahltan Day, my great grandfather Grand Chief Nanok Quock, another chief, and 80 Tahltan witnesses delivered the Tahltan declaration signed and delivered to the representatives of the Canadian governments and the British crown, which states that we have never ceded or surrendered our land at the cost of our own blood from time immemorial. This is still true today, and we continue to rely on the wealth of our land for subsistence and what lies below it for economic opportunities and employment.

I hope to honour my heritage today by facilitating a better understanding of why the Copyright Act needs to respect, affirm, and recognize indigenous peoples' ownership of their traditional and living indigenous knowledge, thereby facilitating respectful relationships between indigenous people and Canada.

For the purposes of this presentation, “indigenous” refers to the first nations, Métis, and Inuit people of Canada.

Currently I am the indigenous services librarian and liaison librarian for anthropology, native studies and social work, and a Ph.D student in anthropology, at the University of Manitoba. I also am the vice-chair and indigenous representative on the board of the Canadian Federation of Library Associations, CFLA-FCAB, and in that capacity I chair the indigenous matters committee and I'm a member of the copyright committee.

I also sit on numerous other boards, including the indigenous matters section of the International Federation of Library Associations, the indigenous advisory circle of the National Film Board, and the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, the Canada Memory of the World Register, and the Sectoral Commission, Culture, Communication and Information of UNESCO.

I'd like to begin today by talking about why it's important that indigenous knowledge be affirmed, respected, and protected under the Copyright Act. Indigenous knowledge is dynamic and has been sustained and transformed throughout time. Indigenous people continue to produce new knowledge in new media, including the music, theatre, dance, photographs, film, poetry, literary expressions, language applications, blogs, social media, and digital collections, etc.

Library and archives and other cultural memory institutions often hold indigenous knowledge and traditional cultural expressions in their collection as a result of research or appropriation or participation with indigenous communities and authors. In some cases, under the Canadian intellectual property regime, indigenous people from whom that knowledge originated and who are the traditional intellectual property holders have inappropriately lost their ownership rights. Who holds the legal copyright to the knowledge or cultural expressions under Canadian copyright is often contrary to indigenous notions of copyright ownership.

Parallel to western culture, indigenous people regard unauthorized use of their cultural expressions as theft. The indigenous world view includes the understanding that indigenous knowledge should only be transferred with the owner's permission from the originating people, and should be within that method of transmission.

As Canada works toward reconciliation, a fair and balanced intellectual property system works for everyone, including indigenous peoples.

In their knowledge systems, indigenous people have developed this wealth of indigenous knowledge that they rightly wish to protect under their constitutional rights as Canadians. They also wish to create their own knowledge protocols and have those protected under the Copyright Act. Therefore, Canada needs to acknowledge indigenous people to maintain, control, protect, and develop traditional knowledge and traditional knowledge expressions within our current intellectual property right regime in order to access, use, and protect indigenous knowledge by developing appropriate protocols with indigenous people. Essentially, reconciliation is about establishing respectful relationships with indigenous people.

I'm noticing the time, so I'm going to skip ahead in my speech and talk about the protection of indigenous knowledge and the truth and reconciliation committee that was formed in 2016 to address the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to action. I'll talk about our recommendation 8, which asked the Canadian government to affirm and protect indigenous knowledge under the existing Copyright Act.

I want to recommend that indigenous knowledge be respected in the public domain, and that we do that in keeping with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, particularly article 31. I join with CFLA-FCAB and its indigenous knowledge and copyright statement that was released last week in asking that the copyright reform “respect, affirm, and recognize indigenous people's ownership of their traditional and living respective indigenous knowledge.” This would allow for Canada's diverse indigenous people to develop indigenous knowledge and cultural expression protocol agreements that reflect their diverse cultural heritage and traditions. One nation's protocol concerning the sharing of knowledge and cultural expression will be different from another's, so there needs to be room left for indigenous nations to work with their elders and knowledge keepers to develop these protocols.

Meduh—thank you, in English— for the opportunity to speak with you today. I ask that you join me and other Canadians on the path towards reconciliation. I ask that you walk, not in front of me or behind me, but that you walk beside indigenous people to create a new Canada where all people are treated equally and are respected fairly under the law. I welcome the opportunity to answer questions you may have.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Thank you very much.

We're going to move right to questions. Mr. Sheehan, you have seven minutes.

[Terry Sheehan, Liberal, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Thank you very much to all our presenters. Of course, I would also reiterate what I reiterated the last time, to acknowledge that we are on the traditional territories of the first nation people of this area, and also of the Métis.

This subject is very important to us as we are trying to review the copyright law. It has been said many times that it's not adequate to cover indigenous peoples' art, their culture, it's extremely important.

I'm not indigenous. My wife and children are Métis. Sault Ste. Marie, where I'm from, is a traditional area. People used to come from all over the Midwest and the Prairies to meet along St. Marys River because of the whitefish. It became an area to which everyone was coming to fish, to bring back to their communities as far away as here in Manitoba sometimes. It started to happen around that area, thousands and thousands of years before the Europeans came. There were, naturally, powwows in different forms. There would be culture, song, dance and, of course, the elders telling their stories. It became a really interesting area. Sault Ste. Marie and that area had a dark history as well. It was also home to a residential school. As part of the settlement, the survivors came together and there was a commitment to create an Anishinaabek discovery centre, which the government has funded and is well under way. That's going to house a chiefs' library and some very interesting things.

Your testimony is very important, because what we're trying to understand is that the copyright law has fundamental principles under British and European law, and that doesn't necessarily work for first nations. I think some of you have mentioned it. The first one is that a lot of times, copyright is attached to an individual, and on the indigenous side, it's the community, it's the people, that it's attached to.

If I get very specific about the Copyright Act, it affords exclusive rights to one or more specific persons over an original work, fixed in some way. These rights are affordable largely for commercial purposes. The rights holder can transfer these rights to another individual or entity, and the rights themselves are temporary. Once they expire, the work is freely available to the public. To what extent do these principles conflict with the ways in which indigenous communities understand their cultures and traditional knowledge?

I'll start with perhaps Dr. Lavallee.

[Dr. Lynn Lavallee]

Indigenous knowledge varies. It's really hard to answer that question because it depends on the type of indigenous knowledge you're talking about. I gave you Marlene Brant Castellano's definition of the traditional knowledge passed down to the generations, spiritual knowledge, and empirical knowledge—usually about our medicines.

I'm going to tell a story to try to get to that. I think when it comes to something like the medicine wheel, a lot of people understand the medicine wheel teachings. It's a circle with four quadrants. You might have white, red, black, and yellow. Black might be replaced with blue if you're in Cree territory, but not all indigenous peoples in Canada have medicine wheel teachings. Medicine wheel teachings are vast and they're thousands and thousands of years old. You cannot actually cite the original author of the medicine wheel teachings, like APA style. It's impossible.

I remember that years and years ago, they wanted me to review something. It was a health promotion focus. They used the principles of the medicine wheel to talk about health promotion. They had me review this, and nowhere did they acknowledge the medicine wheel teachings. They didn't say where they obtained them, how they obtained them. They might have Googled them. Then they copyrighted that framework based on the medicine wheel. Nobody can use that framework because it's based on our traditional teachings that are thousands and thousands of years old.

I don't know if that's answering your question. It really depends on the knowledge. As a researcher in an academic institution, I firmly believe that some knowledge should never enter the institution because it's too vulnerable. An example of that is our traditional medicines and our traditional healing practices. You don't learn about that in a 12-week program or a four-year degree. It's impossible. You go through, for lack of a better term, an “apprenticeship” for decades, and even then you're not going to have all the knowledge. You never get to the point where you have all the knowledge. You're always learning.

I think there is some knowledge that doesn't belong in copyright at all. You can't copyright our traditional teachings. Think about the sweat lodge ceremony. I've seen students do a dissertation. You have to copyright your dissertation. You're the sole author. That's the whole purpose of doing a dissertation, to advance knowledge. They reported on the sweat lodge ceremony. It happened to be somebody I went to the sweat lodge with. I said, “Do you know that somebody actually wrote about this in detail describing exactly what happens in this ceremony?” and the elder didn't know. This is a thesis document that's publicly available—not too publicly, because it's in the ivory tower.

I know I jumped around and maybe didn't focus on the answer.

[Terry Sheehan, Liberal, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Those are important points to make.

Camille.

[Camille Callison]

I first want to talk a little bit about ownership. Some indigenous knowledge is owned by an individual, by a clan, by a family, or it can be owned by the nation. But it's not all communal ownership. It's actually kind of a fallacy for people to think about communal ownership in that way because that's not appropriate.

Part of what I didn't have enough time to discuss was indigenous legal and governance systems in our indigenous laws and the funding to be able to make these happen. One of the reasons why the recommendation was as it was, after we put our heads together, and after years of of my own research, is that I wanted to propose some kind of a solution rather than coming with problems all the time. I felt that a generic statement respecting, affirming, and acknowledging indigenous ownership would be appropriate.

One of the reasons is that we hold what we call a Tahtlan in my community, a knowledge agreement, when we're working with other communities or with government to share knowledge. It lays out whether knowledge is sacred, and what we need to do with certain types of knowledge. It's going to be different with every nation across Canada. Here, in Treaty 1 territory, they don't tell stories until the snow is on the ground. That wouldn't be what is happening in my community when we're telling stories around the campfire when the salmon is flowing in the river. We tell stories in our feast house all year round. It's not going to be the same thing for every community, and we're not going to be able to find a one-size-fits-all solution across Canada with the diversity of so many different nations across this great country that we live in. Part of it is that we would do Tahtlan knowledge agreements, and we see these traditional protocol agreements.... I believe in calling it indigenous knowledge because our knowledge is still living, it's dynamic, it's still breathing, and we still breathe life into it.

You see these protocols, and I remember signing them with mining companies because that's where, in our community, we benefited from that employment and economic opportunity, but we also shared traditional use with them so they could avoid our sacred areas. They would act like it was a gift, because indigenous or traditional knowledge wasn't covered under the Canadian Copyright Act.

The reason why I felt passionate about it is that we see this knowledge leaving our communities, and it's not being shared in a culturally appropriate way. It needs to be shared in the cultural context from that originating community. There is some knowledge that women can't see when they are on their moon. It's not because that's derogatory to women, but because we honour our women, and we think that they are more powerful at that time. There is also knowledge that can't be seen. I can't tell a Ch’ioyone or wolf story in my community. I can't tell a story that belongs to another family. That's where it becomes that cultural context, so it needs to be shared in that culturally appropriate way. The only way that I feel that that could happen is through a generic statement of respect, for affirmation, and that indigenous people own that knowledge, and then work with the indigenous communities to provide funding for their indigenous legal systems to create those protocols.

We're already doing this in universities. We're having informed consent. We're having libraries or archives or museums work with people. There are many examples across the country. There are reciprocal research agreements. There are things that we do at the University of Manitoba that we can take advantage of to be able to create those for communities. That's part of why I would say that. Some knowledge isn't appropriate to be shared. Even as a Tahtlan person, my uncle would say....

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

We're going to have to move on, sorry. We have a whole bunch of questions that we need to ask, so we have to make sure that everybody gets a chance to ask them.

Mr. Lloyd, go ahead.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Thank you. It's interesting having another Mr. Lloyd at the committee.

Welcome, all members of the panel. Thank you for your presentations. My first question will be directed towards the art community, so Ms. Kinloch and Mr. Lloyd.

We've heard from other people, usually publishers and academics and authors, that the universities and libraries are using this 10% rule in order to deal with copyright. They can copy up to 10% without incurring fees. In the visual art world, which is what you deal with, how are they respecting copyright? Do they have a 10%? How would a 10% rule work, and how are they interacting with you?

[Alexis Kinloch]

I believe it works in the same way. Visual artists whose work is copied from textbooks also lose out on those payments because it's no longer required in people's eyes because of the change in the 2012 amendments. So I would say that it's very similar. There was no difference.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

How does that work practically? Are they taking 10% of a picture, or is it like an anthology of pictures an artist has put together, and they're saying that they can take one out of 10 of these things?

[Alexis Kinloch]

I don't know the details of that, particularly. The Winnipeg Arts Council doesn't deal with copyright on a day-to-day basis. As we both stated, we support the upholding of the artist, their knowledge, and their leadership in this, so we support CARFAC as a group of artists who have been working on this. We get our information from them and would defer to them and to Access Copyright to answer the questions we're not able to.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Thank you.

This question is for Ms. Callison or Dr. Lavallee.

Even the authors and publishers we've talked to in previous committee hearings are not satisfied with the Copyright Act. They're not satisfied with fair dealing. They feel their works are being stolen from them. As well, the indigenous folks we have spoken to are feeling similar things, that their knowledge, art, and copyright are also being taken from them.

Also, I believe that you have asked this committee, in your testimony, for indigenous knowledge to be protected under the Copyright Act. However, wouldn't you agree that it seems that from the perspective of the authors, who are already supposedly protected by the Copyright Act, that protection simply isn't enough? Can you comment on that?

[Dr. Lynn Lavallee]

The perspective I was providing was of somebody who isn't the holder of that knowledge and does not have copyright to that knowledge. An example of that is a researcher who gathers information and traditional teachings from people and writes it down. They are the collector of that information, and they have copyright over that.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

That is an important issue, as well.

If there were an indigenous author who did create an original work that was being used by somebody without their free, prior, and informed consent, would you view that as an act of theft from that indigenous author?

[Dr. Lynn Lavallee]

Yes, if it's not cited. If you're talking about written—