Good afternoon.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today about copyright.
As mentioned, I'm April Britski, Executive Director of CARFAC, the national association for visual artists, many of whom are watching this presentation today in homes and studios across the country with great interest.
Our brief includes three recommendations. Our colleagues at RAAV will speak to two of them more specifically, and I will focus on one of them, the artist's resale right, which you just heard about.
The artist's resale right entitles visual artists to receive a royalty payment each time their work is resold publicly through an auction house or a commercial gallery. The resale right allows artists to share in the ongoing profits made from their work. We've all heard headlines about an artist's work breaking sales records at an auction, but what most people don't realize is that artists don't get paid anything from those sales, at least not in Canada.
Once this is established in Canada, artists would be paid on sales at home as well as when their work is sold in countries that have the artist resale right. France first legislated this in 1920, and it now exists in at least 93 countries worldwide, including the entire European Union. It has been discussed in trade negotiations with the EU, as well as at the World Intellectual Property Organization, which is advocating for mandatory international implementation.
We have only five minutes to speak today, and our brief is limited to 2,000 words, but CARFAC has a detailed proposal for how we recommend that it could work for Canada. We keep up to date on developments and legislative reviews in other countries and have studied this issue extensively. I'm sure you have many questions, and I hope that I have answers.
First, you may ask yourself, why do we need a law? Can't the market just regulate itself? Why do we need a new tax?
Let me be clear. A copyright royalty is not a tax. It is not collected by government or spent by government. It is not administered by governments, and we wouldn't ask you to intervene in the administration of it. It also doesn't require any government funding. It is, in fact, a taxable copyright royalty, something that artists would have to report on their taxes.
We need a legal mechanism, because if people aren't required to pay, they won't—the previous presenter won't, as you can see.
We just need a legal framework. After that, there are ways to allow the market to administer it efficiently, and we have good models. We have 93 models to look at, actually, for ways to administer it, and many of the questions you may have about the mechanics have been considered by these other countries, and certainly by us.
With respect, what we're asking for is 5% on ongoing profits of eligible works of art. It wouldn't apply to all sales—for sure it won't—and I don't think that's unreasonable. Artists are the primary producers of culture in this country, and yet they are paid less than anyone else in our sector. None of us at this table would have a job without them, quite frankly, and they deserve better.
I'll let my colleague Josh speak a little more.