Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise and speak to this extremely important copyright bill. When I was the science and technology critic before the last election, I had the pleasure of sitting on the committee that addressed this extremely important issue which, as we know, goes back a long way.
Canada, of course, signed on to the WIPO treaty back in the 1990s. We all know that it has been a long tortuous road with respect to modernizing our copyright bill. We in the Liberal Party attempted to do so; unfortunately, with changes in government and other things, it did not happen, so here we are today with Bill C-11.
I participated in a legislative committee before the election when the bill was known as Bill C-32. As has been pointed out many times today already, there is no change in the wording of Bill C-11 versus Bill C-32.
This is surprising to me. In reality we listened to a very large number of witnesses from many different fields. They represented what I would call the three main stakeholders: industry, the producers of video games, movies, music sets, electronic books and those kinds of things; consumers, all of us who buy these copyrighted materials; and finally the third group, the artists. There are a great many artists who are ultimately the producers of the works that we buy.
We heard from a large number of these people, and from other groups in the education field, as well as librarians, photographers and a great many people who have an interest in modernizing the copyright law.
When we finally saw Bill C-11 as it was presented just recently, we discovered, as I said, that there had been no changes whatsoever to it, yet there were some very compelling testimonies presented by the witnesses who appeared earlier this year. Personally I would have thought, and I had hoped, that the version we would be dealing with today would have had some changes put into it.
In relation to many areas that needed to be modernized under copyright, I would say this is a good bill, and the Liberal Party is ready to support those aspects. However, there are also a number of areas on which we feel the points brought up by witnesses were valid. We feel there should have been consideration given to changing it to make it a more balanced copyright bill. Unfortunately, that did not happen.
I have to say that the thought went through my mind as to whether there had been any intention to listen to any of the witnesses who had appeared. So far, on face value, I would have to say no, because nothing has actually changed between Bill C-32 and Bill C-11.
Although we will be going to committee with Bill C-11, my question is this: are we going to end up with exactly the same bill at the end of that process, or is the government really willing to actually listen to some of the inputs? That is my concern.
This morning the heritage minister said that they did not change anything in Bill C-32 when they made it Bill C-11 out of respect for all those witnesses.
Now, there are two ways to take that, and I am not quite sure what he meant. One possibility is that the Conservatives have stored up the witnesses' input and at the end of the process will make changes. The other is that they are really telling us that we will go through this charade for whatever amount of time Bill C-11 will be debated in committee and otherwise, but will end up with exactly the same bill that was presented a while ago. We therefore introduced an amendment this morning.
As I have said, there are a lot of good things in Bill C-11 that we fully support. For example, I come from a riding where there is a major video game presence. It is a large industry. Canada is a leader in this area, and I support the desire and the need to protect against piracy. That is very important for Canada. That is an example of something we support entirely.
We also have no problem with certain other things, such as some of the fair dealing provisions that would deal with parody and satire.
However, there are other areas where valid points have been brought up. The first one, of course, has to do with digital locks.
Our point of view in the Liberal Party is that if people buy a copyrighted product such as a piece of music, a video, or an electronic book, download it and pay for it legitimately, then they have bought the right to that product. If they choose to transfer it to another device, again for their personal enjoyment and for a non-infringing personal purpose, then we do not believe they should be forbidden from doing that, even if it has a digital lock on it. That is fundamental in our position. It is because those people have paid for the product, and it remains a product that they want to use for personal purposes.
The argument presented by the minister of heritage is that if it has a lock on it and the buyers intend to transfer it, they have a choice of either breaking the law or not buying the product. We do not think that is the way we should approach this particular issue of digital locks, nor do the majority of Canadians.
The second thing has to do with fair dealing and the definition of fair dealing. As members know, “fair dealing” is defined under a number of criteria in the Berne Convention. The particular issue that was probably the most contentious was bringing education under fair dealing. When that happened, we in the Liberal Party and a lot of the witnesses asked for a definition of “education” under “fair dealing”. In fact, we proposed, constructively, to codify a number of criteria established by the Supreme Court that would establish whether fair dealing had been infringed because, as members know, if people feel that fair dealing has been infringed, the onus is on them to get themselves a lawyer and say that there was an infringement of the fair dealing with respect to the use of their copyrighted material.
A number of criteria were proposed by the Supreme Court. We believe these are good criteria and that they should be codified. We made that suggestion during the hearings for Bill C-32; a lot of the suggestions were listened to and a lot of people mentioned this same idea, yet we do not find it in Bill C-11. That is something else we find very preoccupying.
Finally, there is the issue of transitional funding to help artists, particularly if we look at an example like the music industry. In relation to this industry, we recognized a number of years ago that artists should be compensated when their music is copied. As members know, we established a levy on CDs and cassettes, and for a while this gave a very good compensation. It got up to about $28 million annually. An organization responsible for sharing that money out among artists did so, and that was accepted by the artists.
Of course, CDs and tapes are not used very much today for recording musical works, so we suggested that an alternative should be put in place, and we still believe it is important to address the requirement for fair compensation for artists who produce works and whose works are copied to other media.
That is the why we proposed this reasoned amendment today. We hope that the Conservative government, as it listens to the debate here and as it goes to committee, is sincere in paying attention to what witnesses say and to all the written submissions.
