Madam Speaker, it is interesting that the Conservative government has even tried to outdo the United States in terms of the digital lock provisions. The digital lock provisions under the DMCA have been reviewed in court. It has found that American citizens do have the right to extract works under certain circumstances.
However, what is also interesting is that we are being fed this fiction by the Conservatives that the music and film industries, that everything will come back if we make digital locks sacrosanct, but we have not seen that in any other jurisdiction. The need to create a monetization stream for artists remains. A digital lock is not a business model. It can be part of a business model, but it is not one in itself. The digital lock cannot replace the remuneration rights of artists.
Let us talk about where the government is attacking collective licensing rights.
Canada created one of the great compromises in the 1980s and 1990s with the private copying regime. It put a small amount of money on every copy, on tapes and then later on CDs that went into a fund for artists because we recognized that people were copying and artists needed some form of royalty. That created a royalty revenue of $25 million to $30 million a year for Canadian artists. That is not chump change, not in the kind of industry we are in right now, where the recording industry has suffered time and time again and artists can count on those royalties. We have done away with extending the private copying levy to the digital realm. We have attacked the mechanical royalties which are $8 million to $12 million a year. Again, that is serious money for Canadian artists.
It is bizarre that a government would announce a right that existed defined by the Copyright Board no longer exists. Artists do not have a right to get paid for their work, end of story, live with the digital locks. That is not a reasonable solution for Canadian artists.