Clearly, we support charitable causes. Our members—Canada's creators and music publishers—are the first to provide free licences for benefit concerts in cases such as the Calgary floods or the Lac-Mégantic tragedy.
However, the charitable objective of certain organizations is less than obvious. Music festivals and performance venues come to mind. For tax purposes, they have obtained charitable status from the Canadian Revenue Agency and, so, are able to take advantage of the regime. A long-standing exemption in the Copyright Act allows them to avoid paying royalties to creators and artists for the performance of their music in a festival or venue. In SOCAN's view, this type of abusive use is not in line with what Canadian lawmakers intended. We therefore feel the exemption needs to be limited.
SOCAN would happily continue to provide licences to organizations with a genuine charitable objective free of charge.
Mr. Daigle could speak to that in greater detail, since he is more of an expert than I am.