Our financiers and our distributors want to deal with the copyright owner.
The producer is the one who has taken the initial economic risk. It was colourful, Maureen, what you said about going downstairs in your dressing gown and writing a script, but years before that, the producer had an idea, was hiring people to develop that, taking the economic risk, approaching a broadcaster or distributor to get some seed money to get them invested in the project, and carrying that through until there was an ultimate product that could be marketed.
That product can only be marketed by the copyright owner. Our biggest single market, of course, is the United States, and our American friends just don't understand any concept other than dealing with the copyright owner and the producer owning the copyright.
It is true that the screenwriters in Canada own the copyright in their screenplays. There's a certain logic to it. We may agree or disagree on that, but they have gone downstairs in their slippers and created that screenplay. However, the producer has worked over the years to turn that—and to work with hundreds of other people—into creating a product that is commercialized by the copyright owner. That's really what we drive at.
If for some reason it was decided that it was important to convey copyright ownership on someone who didn't do all that work, we'd have to somehow as an industry get around that by entering into contracts that convey the copyright to the producer. Otherwise, how is the producer going to commercialize the product in the end? It just doesn't make any sense.