Evidence of meeting #119 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 materials.
A video is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Mary Ng Liberal Markham—Thornhill, ON
Thank you so very much, both of you, for coming to speak to us today.
My first question is for Madam Marelli, to help me understand a bit better the users of the archives, the researchers and so forth. When we were talking about crown copyright and that material, who would be the typical users who would want to access those bodies of work?
Special Advisor, Copyright, Canadian Council of Archives
It could be a family doing a family history. I'll pull an example totally out of my head. Let's say the family of a chaplain in a prison received a letter from the head of that prison because that chaplain was killed during a prison riot in the 1800s. Well, that letter is still under perpetual protection because it was never published, but the family wants to write a family history and needs to publish it. Why shouldn't that letter be included in the materials that we can digitize anyway, if we are looking at prison riots and want to prepare documentation on our websites about that? There's no reason that material should not be included.
Liberal
Mary Ng Liberal Markham—Thornhill, ON
I think about the efforts these days to get greater Canadian content, and the support for Canadian creators, and when I think about creators, I think about young people. I think about those innovators. I think about the kind of research or discovery or finding of works, and ways for them to access material. As we think about the Copyright Act and how we might need to look at it, what do we need to be thinking about in the future?
In other words, you have this great body of work at the archives, and we want to encourage more, not fewer, content creators.
Special Advisor, Copyright, Canadian Council of Archives
We want to get it out there.
Liberal
Mary Ng Liberal Markham—Thornhill, ON
We want it to get out there, and you know, greater digitization and technology formats allow that, and we can have another generation of great content creators in this country.
On that, I have a slightly different question. Data mining might actually come as part of that type of work. You get content in many ways, but some of it might actually be through data mining. Do you think we should be looking at something like an exception that allows for that kind of content scraping, if you will, or content mining, as a provision in the Copyright Act that allows for a future-looking potential use?
Special Advisor, Copyright, Canadian Council of Archives
Digitizing the materials in the first place is an issue. We won't digitize material. You can't mine material that hasn't been digitized—
Special Advisor, Copyright, Canadian Council of Archives
—unless you're doing it by hand, with index cards, which is the old way of doing it.
We cannot think about digitizing materials unless we can actually make them accessible on our website. That's the kind of materials we actually digitize.
Before we even get to the point of data mining, you have to be able to go through the digitization process, and we talk about orphan works in the brief that we're going to submit. I didn't talk about it today because we had a limited amount of time, but orphan works are definitely one of those issues. There are barriers, and in the case of archives, most of the material in our institutions is not commercially viable material. It's material from families. It's material from individuals, from companies, material that doesn't have a commercial value in and of itself. The material has a historical value. So the barriers to doing the digitization in the first place are an issue before you even get to the data mining.
Special Advisor, Copyright, Canadian Council of Archives
Do you mean our materials?
Special Advisor, Copyright, Canadian Council of Archives
I would say less than 5%.
Special Advisor, Copyright, Canadian Council of Archives
It's very little. We have masses of material.
Liberal
Mary Ng Liberal Markham—Thornhill, ON
Right, okay.
On that point about whether or not there is commercial value to it, I am hoping that in the future some of those creators may actually look through it. In looking at how they might put that out there, they could very well find a stream for it, but that's another conversation.
Special Advisor, Copyright, Canadian Council of Archives
We're working at digitizing materials, but archives don't have a lot of money.
Liberal
Mary Ng Liberal Markham—Thornhill, ON
Okay.
Ms. Peets, just to pick up on a point that was raised a little earlier—actually, I think it was when we were in Montreal—we heard from an organization that is essentially a platform. If I understand it, their technology remunerates authors based on usage, down to a chapter level.
We talk about access to copyright through a tariff approach. We've certainly heard from institutions that it is a challenge because, while you're right that education isn't free, we also want educational institutions to get the material they want and not to have to pay for duplication, which is what we've heard in some of the testimony.
In your view, could something like that work? There are emerging platforms, and certainly, we're seeing it in the music industry, where there is an ability to compensate on a more transactional and on a more targeted use basis. Can you comment on that?
President, Professional Writers Association of Canada
I think you're talking about the pay-per-click model. Most of that is offered at such a low rate. It's a penny per click kind of thing, so if you have written a story or you've written a chapter of a book, you'll get a penny for every person who reads it. That could take a long time. That means a hundred people have to read it for you to make a dollar, so to do a transactional payment like that is very problematic.
Liberal
Mary Ng Liberal Markham—Thornhill, ON
So transactional payment is problematic as it's remunerated now, but if it were remunerated in a fairer way, could the mode work?
President, Professional Writers Association of Canada
I suppose so, but I think you only have to look at what the models are now, and they certainly are skewed towards the person putting the material on the platform, not the person who wrote the material.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy
Thank you.
We're going to move to the last questioner, who is Mr. Jowhari.
Liberal
Liberal
David Lametti Liberal LaSalle—Émard—Verdun, QC
Thank you very much.
Thanks to both of you for coming. I'm an old copyright professor, and I am guilty of rarely having mentioned the reversionary right in over 20 years of teaching, so I am as guilty as anyone else.
