We would like to go into further detail on five points.
The first point is the exceptions for reproduction rights in the act in general.
Starting from the exceptions for reproducing backup copies, ephemeral copies and technological copies, we maintain that many exceptions in the Copyright Act simply do not comply with the three-step test of the Berne Convention. For reasons of convenience, and to save time, we will simply refer you to the brief of the Coalition for Culture and Media, which was presented to you in Montreal on May 8, 2018, and which we support.
The second point is the copyright term.
SODRAC recommends extending the term of protection to 70 years after the death of the creators. Most of Canada's major trading partners already recognize this term, which has become the norm in the following countries, listed alphabetically as examples: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, France, Israel, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The third point is accountability and the value gap, which we talked about earlier.
On one hand, the act allows users to use the works as part of the content they generate, and, on the other hand, the network services are exempt from all responsibility. But people who use digital streaming platforms that chiefly provide this type of content and that market it should not be able to argue the defence stated in section 31.1 of the act.
Rather, we believe that introducing a mandatory licence agreement between the digital streaming platforms and a group of rights holders would be significantly more efficient than forcing those rights holders to make claims with each individual who uploads protected works on the Internet.
The fourth point concerns binding arbitration.
When the Copyright Board of Canada, an administrative tribunal accessible to collectives, renders an arbitration decision, that decision is usually deemed to be binding. However, the Supreme Court recently ruled that licences issued by the board should not be considered as necessarily binding for users. If the intent of Parliament were to implement a procedure to provide royalties for individual cases, its intent was certainly not to allow parties to retain the right to exempt themselves from decisions they do not like. Therefore, an amendment to section 70.4 of the act is required.
The last point concerns foreign servers.
The territorial nature of the interpretation of the act comes up against a reality that knows no borders. Therefore, SODRAC is proposing, much like with communication rights, that Canadian reproduction rights holders have the right, beyond any doubt, to royalties when online services serving Canadians are provided with servers located outside Canada.
The Parliament of Canada has the power to pass extraterritorial legislation. For example, if most of an online target audience is located in Canada, the link could be that final user.
In closing, I would like to mention that SODRAC will submit a brief soon that will list and propose simple amendments to certain sections of the Copyright Act, in order to correct the problems we have raised in our presentation today.