Television and filmmaking are a collaborative endeavour. The producers bring together all the creative elements to move a project from concept to screen.
We producers hire and work closely with all the creative work. We love our screenwriters. Over the years we've hired dozens of them to work on Degrassi. We also love our directors who help turn the scripts into projects, and we've worked with dozens of them over the years. Also crucial to the production is the actors. We work with hundreds of them, the most famous of whom is undoubtedly Drake, but people like Nina Dobrev, Shenae Grimes, and Jake Epstein, and as I say, hundreds of others. They're vital to the final product, as are the production designers, the art designers, the lighting directors, the composers and musicians, the editors, the crews, and the gaffers. They're all vital to helping shape the project and bring our collective vision to the screen. After all, television programs and feature films are the ultimate collective works.
To date we've produced 525 episodes in the various Degrassi franchises. When we start producing episode number 526, we'll hire a director and a team of screenwriters to work on that episode. To suggest that this director or those writers, who worked on one episode of Degrassi long after the characters, the settings, the format, the scenes, the plot, the storylines, and the theme music have all been put in place, ought to be considered the authors of that episode is simply wrong, and it doesn't work commercially. However talented they may be, they are working off a foundation and creating a product that was built up over the years. In addition, they're working together with a whole series of other incredibly talented crew, actors, and cast to make that project come true.
As producers, we pull together those people. We hire them. We pull together all sorts of partners to invest in our projects. We develop them, we manage the production, and we ultimately work to protect, manage, and then commercialize the copyright in our shows.
To reinforce what Wendy and Erin have said, strong enforcement tools help to ensure that we retain the value in our intellectual property. Degrassi is nearly in its 40th year. It's available in 237 countries and 17 languages around the world. It amazes me that on a Friday night just past midnight someone pushes a button or clicks a mouse somewhere in cyberspace and suddenly the entire season is available in 17 languages throughout the world, except in four countries: Syria, North Korea, China—which they're working on—and one other that I forget. This is amazing to me. It's a real success story.
Despite this availability there are over 1,300 torrents and 3,000 illegal links to Degrassi on popular BitTorrent and linking sites just in Canada, each of which can be used to illegally access our content thousands and thousands of times. On one such site, Degrassi has been viewed 50,000 times. I'm not an accountant, so I won't estimate the number at 50,000 times 1,300 or 50,000 times 3,000 or both. Whatever it is, it's an unfathomably large amount of piracy. It's undeniable that piracy remains a serious problem in this country that negatively impacts our ability to grow Canada's production sector to its full capacity.
Copyright owners need effective enforcement tools to plug pipes to illegal content, to prevent free-riding off the backs of creators, and to retain the value in our intellectual property so that we can continue to build off and reinvest in our great Canadian shows.
Finally, the protection, retention, and commercialization of copyright by Canadians is a key part of the government's innovation strategy. To fulfill our key creative and business roles, independent producers need a modernized Copyright Act that provides for strong copyright protections, and an efficient marketplace framework that supports ongoing investment in Canada's innovative creative products. A modernized act will ensure that all our partners in the industry can continue to make great shows that are distributed across multiple platforms for the enjoyment of Canadians and audiences around the world.
Thank you for the opportunity to discuss these issues with the committee. We'd be pleased to answer any questions you might have.