What did you say then? What were you noticing?
Evidence of meeting #114 for Industry, Science and Technology in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was works.
Evidence of meeting #114 for Industry, Science and Technology in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was works.
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
5:10 p.m.
Author, university and college instructor, As an Individual
We said, “This is crap.” I mean—sorry—“This is going to torment writers”, which it did. “Our salaries are going to plummet”, which they did. “Universities are going to take advantage of this”, which they did.
It was a prophecy that nobody wanted to hear at the time. No, no, no—it's all going to work out. It's all going to be good. We have to modernize the act. We said this was not the way to do it. They said, “Ah, don't worry about it”. We worried. It turns out we worried correctly about our incomes as writers.
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
Terry Sheehan Liberal Sault Ste. Marie, ON
What were your recommendations at the time? Do you recall?
5:10 p.m.
Author, university and college instructor, As an Individual
Don't do this.
Did we present a credible alternative? Hey, we liked what was going on before. We liked the Access Copyright structure in the sense that, yes, it is a pain to count individual pages that people photocopy for individual courses. It's difficult to track.
As I think another speaker said, the universities have copyright offices. It you go to the copyright office and say, “I want to use this work”, they say, “Okay. You deal with the copyright.” What are you there for? You know.
It was a system that wasn't perfect, but it worked reasonably well some of the time. It's a lot better than what we have now.
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
Terry Sheehan Liberal Sault Ste. Marie, ON
Okay.
Thank you very much for that.
Kevin, has the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia seen a decline in revenue from copyright in the last five years? I asked Jerry the same question, and he suggested asking you. Do you have some quantitative numbers that you could provide us?
5:10 p.m.
Past President and Publisher, Talonbooks, Association of Books Publishers of British Columbia
Yes. I mentioned them earlier, but I have them here before me. The best example, of course, is to give you my own numbers. I carefully looked these up for you before I came.
Prior to the Copyright Act we averaged close to $20,000 a year in copyright income. That was $18,500. In the last couple of years, it's been below $3,800 and has been dropping. I think most of the other publishers have experienced a similar decline.
That's a decline of about 400% for us. I also heard it argued that it's not a significant part of an income. I pointed out that it's almost 10% of our gross margins. That's really a significant part of our income.
I heard someone mention earlier today that according to Statistics Canada, the average profitability of publishers in Canada in 2016 was 10.1%. I can tell you that the profitability of independent publishers and literary publishers and not the multinationals—because basically they are skewing in the multinationals there—is between 4% and 5%.
To make a profit margin of 4% or 5% means that if there's the slightest fluctuation in your revenue, you stand to lose money. If you lose money, the independent proprietor basically has to write a cheque. I've been known to write some cheques in my time.
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
Terry Sheehan Liberal Sault Ste. Marie, ON
We've heard from other witnesses, publishers, and authors that there are also other challenges they are facing at the same time. Copyright is one of them mixed in with some others, which makes these very difficult and particularly challenging times.
5:10 p.m.
Past President and Publisher, Talonbooks, Association of Books Publishers of British Columbia
I can point out a few of them.
For example, as I think I indicated earlier, a lot of our sales are in the university market, so the bookstores have made a real effort to get students to sell back the textbooks. There's a real increase in the number of used textbooks in the university market. There is also a lot of use of whole digital books in the university market, which obviously has nothing to do with copyright and is not particularly legal, and is taking advantage of those e-book licences, but nobody seems to care. Basically, we have the same number of course adoptions, we sell the same number of books into the university system, but our returns rate has gone from about an average of 18% to an average returns rate now of 40%. Books are returnable. It's a great business. We can sell the books to people, and then they can send them back to us and get full credit. We get to have the expenses twice: once for processing them in and once for processing them out. A significant change in the returns rate, a doubling of the returns rate, is practically enough to bankrupt the publishing industry.
It's been suggested to us that we should get more government funding to replace the legitimate funding that we get from sales and from rights income. I would argue that's not a good idea, because, one, it's not fair; two, it's not a representation of reality; and, three, it doesn't look after the authors in the equation. For the 50¢ of every dollar that we get in rights sales, the authors get 50¢, and for all those books that aren't sold in the universities or come back in returns, the authors don't get any royalties. It's not really an answer on the creator's side to try to say, “Well, don't worry about us abusing the copyright back because we'll slip some money to you through the back door”. I don't really think that's an answer to our problem.
5:15 p.m.
Liberal
Terry Sheehan Liberal Sault Ste. Marie, ON
I just have a little bit of time left. You went through many of the books that you have published, including some by indigenous authors. I'm from Sault Ste. Marie, and there's a large indigenous population around there. I have been asking many of the witnesses about this. The feedback from indigenous communities has been that copyright has not worked for them, for a variety of reasons. Dane picked up on one of them, the oral tradition, whether it's talking about their stories or sometimes their sacred stories. We heard some good testimony in Winnipeg. One woman said that you have to go and ask permission of the indigenous community because the ownership in the indigenous community sometimes is collective—sometimes it is a clan, or it could be an individual. What has been your experience working with your indigenous authors and non-indigenous authors writing about indigenous stories?
5:15 p.m.
Past President and Publisher, Talonbooks, Association of Books Publishers of British Columbia
I really appreciate the chance to address this particular issue.
First of all, in our publishing program we have made a big shift from having a lot of non-indigenous people writing about indigenous subject matter to trying to make more of an effort to engage indigenous people to write about indigenous subject matter. Then there's the complicated issue of people bringing forth the traditional stories, the traditional oral stories from their particular nation.
How is that handled? Publishers in Canada are developing a lot of practices around making sure that either the author or the publisher has gone back and talked to the stakeholders involved in those stories, whether it be the band council, the elders, the particular group of people, or the particular family, because sometimes within the indigenous tribe, stories will be dear to particular families and clans. We go to a lot of trouble now to make sure that trail is traced and those permissions are in place, and that quite possibly the royalties are being paid either to the band or the indigenous elders where the story is being derived from. We will no longer take a story from an indigenous author that is traditional material unless we've made sure they've gone through some process to basically validate why they're able to present that ownership.
Our second vein of attack right now is putting as much effort and study as we can to get more people at the editorial level, whether from an indigenous background or other diverse backgrounds, into the Canadian publishing industry. One good way to make sure indigenous material is treated more respectfully is by having indigenous editors.
5:15 p.m.
Liberal
5:15 p.m.
Conservative
Dane Lloyd Conservative Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB
Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.
This next question is on the experiences you alluded to in your testimony, Ms. Brooks.
As somebody who is both a writer and works within the education system, you see both sides or perspectives and have frustrations with it. Do you think what people are doing with copyright is just innocent, that they're aren't really thinking about it and it's not even in their consciousness right now?
5:15 p.m.
Author, university and college instructor, As an Individual
I think universities, for a variety of reasons, are trying to become more student-centred. We see this with course evaluations. Student course evaluations really have an impact on instructors now, especially instructors who are in more precarious employment. One thing that seems easy to do is to have materials that don't cost students anything. Students complain about the high cost of their education.
5:15 p.m.
Conservative
5:15 p.m.
Author, university and college instructor, As an Individual
Well, not exactly, but if they have to go and buy books that are hundreds of dollars, there is a bit of push-back. I think instructors are very aware of that and are aware of that impacting students' satisfaction with the course.
5:15 p.m.
Conservative
Dane Lloyd Conservative Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB
Maybe they won't sign up for the class, and with that precarious employment, you're risking yourself, basically.
5:15 p.m.
Author, university and college instructor, As an Individual
Yes. The University of British Columbia at one point put out a press release that said they were decreasing student costs by making course packs free. When the Writers' Union of Canada saw this, they wrote them a blistering letter and told them they were doing this on the backs of writers.
The response of the university was not to say, “Gee, maybe we should reconsider our stance on this.” It was to go to the chair of the creative writing department at UBC and say, “How dare your peers”—the writers—“take us to task?”
5:20 p.m.
Conservative
Dane Lloyd Conservative Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB
We had an author in Halifax who was quite unequivocal about this culture of “free”. He said that free culture is not sustainable and that free culture will lead to the end of artists and authors in Canada. Can you comment on that?
5:20 p.m.
Author, university and college instructor, As an Individual
I don't know how many writers have told you that they've stopped doing various forms of writing. I used to do short freelance pieces quite a bit. I freelanced for different newspapers and magazines across Canada.
At one point I went to the B.C. magazine awards. I can't tell you how long ago this was. I'm going to say it was around 2000. The guy who was given the lifetime achievement award talked about how the rate has been a dollar a word for feature articles in national magazines for too long. It was a dollar a word when he started 20 years ago and it was still a dollar a word. He said that had to change, because people can't afford to write a feature article for a national magazine for a dollar a word.
A few years later, I was asked to do a cover story for Vancouver magazine. I did it, and the editor said to me, “You've done such a great job. You've been so great to work with. I'm going to give you my top rate: 85¢ a word.” And it's gone down since then.
So it doesn't really pay. As other panellists have mentioned, at a certain point it's not worth it for writers. When you're trying to broaden the number of stories and voices in Canadian culture, which has so many spinoff economic effects that are good, you end up narrowing it to people who can afford to subsidize that themselves.
5:20 p.m.
Conservative
Dane Lloyd Conservative Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB
When I walk into the local Chapters or something like that, there's a very small Canada section. I know that Chapters tries their best to have Canadian or local authors up there. I don't know if there are more, but it seems to me there's a real shortage of authentic Canadian authors who are publishing. It seems that when you go into bookstores, it's just all American works and European works.
With this current status quo, is there a real threat to indigenous Canadian writing? I don't mean indigenous in just the aboriginal sense, but indigenous to Canada.
5:20 p.m.
Author, university and college instructor, As an Individual
I think it's really not common knowledge. A few years ago, I served on a B.C. awards jury. I think our awards were either $6,000 or $12,000. It was $6,000 for a less established writer and $12,000 for a more established writer. I was shocked at the number of big names in Canadian writing, people whose names you would recognize if I said them, who were still applying for these $12,000 awards.
People are on very narrow margins. Every penny really does count. That goes for the publishers as well, as Mr. Williams has said.
5:20 p.m.
Liberal
5:20 p.m.
Liberal
Majid Jowhari Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Maya, you talked about AI and developing logic and using training datasets to make sure that the logic is going to do what it's intended to do. This training data will come from various sources. First, if it's in a digital format—whether it's content that's been created by an author or whether it's an image—is this now subject or not subject to the Copyright Act?
5:20 p.m.
Lawyer, Norton Rose Fulbright Canada, As an Individual
If the data is a book, like a digital copy of the book, it would be subject to copyright. It's just the digital format of a literary work.
