Industry Committee on Oct. 31st, 2018

[Lou-ann Neel]

Here in B.C., I know that we've had a lot of discussion around that. Again, that falls under the example that's being set by our language revitalization communities. There's still no upper-level legislative protection that covers everybody the same way because the languages are so different and the communities' approaches are different. Everyone is at a different stage of doing this kind of work. Many of the communities that have been at it for a while have taught to ensure that any curriculum or any of these kinds of materials, which are being developed with the language, should rest with the nation. By nation I mean the language nation, not necessarily the Indian Affairs band structure because that's an administrative structure, but the traditional knowledge keepers and intellectual property holders of that knowledge work together in teams with their language specialists, so that it remains with the tribe.

We do still need some recognition of those entities, at the upper levels and at legislative levels, especially. With the Copyright Act, I think this is a place to start and I think it can duplicate itself across other pieces of legislation.

[Dan Albas]

At that same school, there are non-indigenous teachers who do teach and have created good relationships in the community, have built the trust of the children and have put together specific processes. Again, if someone was to put some of that traditional knowledge into a different format, like a textbook or audio material or a website, would that person be able to then have copyright to be able to have those works produced in a larger format?

I'm just worried that, if we don't have certain rules about how we navigate these areas, we won't see the propagation of culture and new innovation, especially. There's a gentleman who's tweeting an Inuktitut word a day and again, there's a teacher who's taking that content with his permission and formalizing it in school. That's an innovation. At some point, he may choose to codify it in a book. That's where I think many of these things have to be answered.

I appreciate your submission today.

If I could, I'd like to go quickly on to the artist resale. First of all, if someone is indigenous—and again, not all first nations, as there's also Innu, Inuit, Métis—would all those be able to participate in this registry? What if someone does not identify their works as indigenous, specifically, but they're of indigenous origin? How does that work with the registry?

[Tony Belcourt]

The people who are involved in our discussions are first nations and Métis. The Inuit have the Inuit Art Foundation and they have the tag system. We're talking about wanting to be able to collaborate and work together, obviously, but the people involved are first nations and Métis people, at this point.

[Dan Albas]

If someone creates art that they would not classify as indigenous and again, let's say that it's a classical oil painting, would that qualify under this because they're of indigenous origin or would it only apply to a certain criteria, which is specified by the registry's criteria?

[Tony Belcourt]

That's up for discussion. Our focus is to bring indigenous artists together and that their art is what will be registered. We haven't put limits on it at this point.

You have raised a really good question. I hadn't even thought about it. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Thank you.

We're going to move on to Mr. Masse, for seven minutes.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Thank you to the witnesses for being here and to those who are in different locations.

With regard to the Copyright Act, are there things that can be done right now, without a legislative review, that you would suggest as a priority?

My concern is that the committee here will turn around a decision to the minister in terms of a report. The minister will get back to us. Then there will have to be legislative changes in the future. If there are going to be changes to the act, that will require it then going through Parliament again, and then it will be signed eventually and so forth. We're probably not going to see much happen through legislative measures for the next year and a half, with an election looming.

With that in mind, maybe I will start here in Ottawa and then turn to our guests by video conference, could you prioritize things that maybe under the legislative framework you would like to see get some immediate results, if there are things, or is this a larger problem?

[Monique Manatch]

What comes to mind immediately is the fact that the copyright law is based on the individual. Our knowledge and culture is based with our communities. It's community-oriented. For example, there are images used on the teepees out west, where the families own those images. Only certain members of the family are given the responsibility and ability to put those images on those particular teepees. When someone comes along and takes a picture of those images, and then turns around and sells T-shirts, and claims copyright because they have the images....

If you change the form of the knowledge, that does not constitute ownership of the knowledge. Regardless of what form the knowledge takes, whether it goes to a website or becomes a book, the knowledge itself is still owned by the community.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Okay.

[Monique Manatch]

I think that's a starting point, for me anyway.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

That's good advice.

[Tony Belcourt]

We've been in discussions with officials, as I mentioned before, at the Canada Council for the Arts and also Canadian Heritage. They are interested in what we're doing because at Canadian Heritage, in fact, they were planning to do some research on their own.

What we would like to do, and if this committee could support us, is to have this work on a possible regulation and so on, which could be developed in conjunction with the indigenous artist community and support our full participation and inclusion in that work. My purpose coming here today....

I'm not speaking on behalf of an organization. I can't. I speak for myself, but I know the sentiments of what our people are talking about.

The Copyright Act is before you now. There are going to be amendments to the Copyright Act. If you're going to include an amendment for an artist's resale right, I wanted to say to leave it open enough so that it won't be just limited to the sale of art through auction or galleries. Enable this new technology to come into play and be used as well, so that there can also be direct sale between artists and sellers and the resale right would apply in that circumstance as well.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. Blackfield.

[Johnny Blackfield]

I would say, from a technology standpoint, that we can absolutely start to build the technology for an indigenous art registry right now. There are certain other factors beyond legislation that such a registry could help.

One of the key attributes of such a registry would be provenance, or essentially figuring out who exactly the artist is. Once indigenous artists register their art and it's authenticated on a blockchain, it's their claim for eternity. It's immutable. As far as I know, we don't need any legislation to implement that. The legislation would be on enforcing the resale right or whatever percentage we assign to that.

Right now we can build the technology, but it will still take anywhere from a minimum of six months to 18 months to build this effectively. We can build it and then enforce legislation—whatever it turns out to be—at a later point.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Thank you.

Ms. Neel.

[Lou-ann Neel]

We've been waiting a really long time for some steps to move forward. One of my most immediate priorities is the formation of a national indigenous arts service and advocacy organization. We need some sort of a system where, as my colleagues mentioned, we can address committees such as this and also respond to the different departments that have the responsibility and mandates to address things that affect our artists.

It's all about rebuilding the structures within our communities so that we can respond to these things. Many of the systems we had in place traditionally were really clear about who got to be an artist, how they got trained, what they did with their art and what art forms they were allowed to practice. All of that structure came apart with all of the things we've heard about, like residential schools and the Indian Act. It's about redress and rebuilding. This is something we can do at an administrative and operational level without changes to legislation.

In the long term, I still would like to see amendments to the act and, further into the future, either addendums to the act or exemptions from it.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

That's very good.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Thank you very much.

We're going to move to Mr. Graham. You have seven minutes.

[David de Burgh Graham, Laurentides—Labelle, Lib.]

Thank you.

One of the great frustrations I have in my life is that my great-grandfather, Alphonse Paré, spoke English, French, Cree and Ojibwa and didn't pass that knowledge on to the next generations. That frustrates me greatly.

For me to hear that the vast majority of so-called “indigenous art” isn't legitimate frustrates me. I didn't know that. There's nothing quite so horrifying as buying indigenous art and finding a “made in China” label on the back of it.

How can I as a consumer, and people generally, recognize fraudulent or counterfeit indigenous art? What can we do about it from that side of things as well?

[Lou-ann Neel]

We actually had an initiative here in B.C. that began to address that through the Indigenous Tourism Association. We did an authenticity labelling system. It was a pilot. We did this in 2014 and 2015, but of course it required funding support. We did not have the funding support to continue it.

By and large, the shops, galleries, producers and artists we talked with were very much in favour of this as a starting point—as something we could do. I could really see the synergies between that particular system and the system that Mr. Belcourt and his colleague have proposed.

There's that to take care of, but again, it's about public education and relationships. As Canadian citizens, we all need to realize that here we are in our country yet we're being treated differently. Other artists do not have the same challenges we do. I always use Robert Bateman as an example. Would you take a Bateman painting copy and expect not to hear from his lawyer?

We need that kind of support. We need organizational support. We need the ability, among our nations, to rebuild the kinds of structures we had that protected these ancient traditions.

[David de Burgh Graham]

Thank you.

I don't want to end there, because it's really interesting, but I do want to ask a few other questions of other people as well.

Mr. Blackfield, you mentioned problems of scalability with blockchain. Artist resales especially is something that takes place over an infinitely long time frame. Therefore, blockchains would have to be infinitely scalable to work. How scalable are blockchains?

[Johnny Blackfield]

That's a really good question, sir.

Right now, public blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have all had scalability issues. They're the most secure blockchains out there right now, because they've been tested over years, but they do have scalability issues. Some of the enterprise blockchains, the permission blockchains such as Hyperledger and Corda, and other platforms, are actively working on the scalability issue. For example, I run a start-up and we build on Corda, and we're trying to build a platform that can do millions of transactions every second, because we're building a trading platform.

This is one of the biggest problems being worked on in the blockchain world. I don't believe anyone has a solid result yet, but the blockchain world is so young that I would say in the next six to 18 to 24 months we're going to have some very scalable solutions. That being said, I don't ever see a blockchain art registry having as many transactions as, say, a stock exchange on blockchain. They're building platforms for stock exchanges, so that technology could very well be used for an art registry.

Although it is a problem today, it is not something I believe will be a huge sticking point in the future.

[David de Burgh Graham]

I've been in technology long enough to know that there's no system that lasts forever in technology, so when something comes along that inevitably makes blockchain obsolete, or we discover that it isn't actually secure after all and there's some major vulnerability in the whole algorithmic process, how hard is it to get that cumulative historical data out of it and into the next system? If it's all cryptographically signed, how are we going to get that entire history back and salvage it?

[Johnny Blackfield]

That would really depend on what kind of blockchain you design in the first place. Again, blockchain is more of a methodology than a technology. It's being used in different ways. Like I said, there are different platforms and other technologies, and they're still evolving. Right now, I don't see too many reasons why blockchain would fail completely long term. There are certain limitations. Blockchain is not a solution for everything, though a lot of people think it is. I believe a system that's well designed and planned and takes the time to get there as opposed to rushing to market will actually prove to be quite useful in blockchain.

I completely appreciate your understanding of technology and your history in it and you're right that no system is fail-safe. There will be blockchains that will be hacked in the future for sure, especially now that we have quantum computing and other advances like that coming through, but right now it's the absolute best solution we have. There will be vulnerabilities in the future for sure, but people are working on that, too.

I think that's the best answer I can give you right now.

[David de Burgh Graham]

I appreciate that, but in the same vein, in a totally decentralized environment, which is what you're talking about being available as an option, someone has to hold the data somewhere. If everybody says somebody else is holding it, then sooner or later, nobody's holding it and the data is gone. How do you centralize a decentralized system?