Okay, good.
With me is Dave Forget, Director of Policy.
We appreciate the committee's invitation to present the DGC's work with the Directors Rights Collective of Canada, particularly as this work reflects a core principle of the DGC, which is that Canadian directors and screenwriters should be recognized in law as co-authors of the audiovisual work.
The DGC is a national labour organization representing key creative and logistical professionals in the film, television and digital media industries. Today, we have approximately 5,000 members covering all areas of direction, production, editing and visual design.
In 1998, the Directors Guild of Canada founded the Directors Rights Collective of Canada (DRCC), a collecting society that administers foreign royalty payments from copyright legislation in other jurisdictions and distributes those earnings to all Canadian directors, from all genres. In 2017, the DRCC paid out $796,000 in foreign royalties to its membership of 1,349 Canadian directors.
Directors are entitled to these royalties under national copyright legislation and monetization systems outside of Canada, primarily in Europe, but increasingly elsewhere where copyright laws identify audiovisual directors as the authors of their work and require payments in much the same way as SOCAN requires payments for composers and songwriters in Canada.
Here in Canada, while the current Copyright Act leaves the authorial status of so-called cinematographic work ambiguous, both the text and subsequent legal rulings give overwhelming support to the proposition that the screenwriter and the director are co-authors of the work.
Section 11.1 of the act distinguishes between audiovisual content with “dramatic character” and content without dramatic character, giving a normal term of copyright, which is the life of the author plus 50 years, only to those works where “the arrangement or acting form or the combination of incidents represented give the work a dramatic character”.
A writer, of course, creates a “combination of incidents” known as a plot or a script. A director then directs the acting and conceives and arranges all of the various creative elements that will ultimately appear on screen, creating the staging, camera frames, camera movements, conceiving the settings and selecting locations, determining the tone and interaction of performers, arranging the final sequence of images in the edit and determining the sound design and musical score.
Section 11.1, for all intents and purposes, gives a job description for screenwriters and directors. If authorship in audiovisual media means creating an original work and giving it dramatic character, as the act defines it, then it only stands to reason that the author is the originator and creator who provides that dramatic character.