Mr. Speaker, my head spins sometimes when I hear the commentary from the other side. It is disturbing to me that the bill is coming out from a collection of individuals who have shown very little understanding of the process of creation and have decided to look at the end result and make the law based on the end result without looking at the effect of how we got there.
The current bill in its form now does a great disservice to the very people copyright legislation is supposed to protect. Either the government realizes this and does not care, or it is unaware of it. However, being the eternal optimist that I am, I believe there are some members over there who do care about these people, the creators. Therefore, I speak on record in hopes that in the future those same people will realize the changes needed to make the bill work.
Copyright starts with the creator and ends with the creator. Therefore, my focus is on the independent creator. I define “independent creator” as a freelance individual who is neither commissioned nor employed by an organization to create or develop a work in that organization's name. These individuals who depend on copyright law are the vast number of individuals that this law would affect. They depend on copyright law to ensure their rights to their work remain in their hands. It gives them the right to choose how the work is used and, through the Copyright Board, determine the value of that work and the determination of how it is used.
Believe it or not, because the delivery system has changed it does not mean copyright owners, or creators, should be penalized on the remunerated access to their work. They should still be paid for the work they do. It has taken a lot of decades to get to a point where artists can monetize the work they used. This is what I believe is being missed, especially on the mechanical rights. It is not a trade-off between piracy and remuneration; they both should be worked on and protected. Therefore, if we have individuals who wish to own a copy of a work created, whether they purchase it at their local music store or they purchase it online, it is still purchased.
Something I will share is that the changing of platform has existed since radio has existed. Back in the day, it was not as easy with digital records, where we just plop our MP3 player into our computer and transfer it onto the unit. Back in the day, it was a little less classy, a little less stealthy. We stood there with our portable tape recorder, held the mike up to the speaker and put it on a cassette so we could walk around with it. That was platform shifting back in the day.
The industry caught onto that and came up with eight-track players so people could listen to it in their cars. Unfortunately, the eight-track player did not go very far. Then cars started coming in with cassettes and the recording companies started making music available on cassettes so people could play it in their cars. Individuals would purchase the LP and/or the single and they would buy the eight-track and/or the cassette. They would pay four times so they could have their music where they wanted it.
Therefore, platform shifting existed from the beginning. I would like people to keep that in mind.
In the case of access for commercial use, one has access currently to a file or we purchase the file once. Now we have broadcasters asking why they should have to pay for things twice. They are not. They are paying for it once. After that, the commercial entity pays for each use, so we have an access fee and we have a use fee. Why use fees? Why should artists not just be thankful that their work is being played? Times have changed.
When radio first came into play, it was a medium of communication. We had live radio dramas and so forth. Then recorded music hit the ground. Rock and roll came about. Radio stations realized there was money in it, that if they played it, people would listen to the radio station and they could flog products that people would buy and the radio stations would get money from the advertising companies.
Once upon a time it was like this. Radio broadcasters seemed to feel that songs and artists would not exist if not for them. There may have been at one point a modicum of truth to that. Once upon a time, record companies could go to radio stations and give them little goodies so they would play their songs. That resulted in the payola scandal back in the day.
In recent years, we have seen self-releases through personal websites that have proven quite effective in raising the profile of an artist to the point where an artist is already famous. Take Metric, for example, which won a number of Junos about two years ago, having not signed a major recording contract and doing all its publicity and sales through the website. It got to the point where radio stations were looking for it because people wanted to hear the band's music. Therefore, one has to question who benefits whom, in terms of whether radio needs the artist or the artist needs radio. For me, I think it is a very symbiotic relationship.
That being said, a few broadcasters appeared in front of the last legislative committee. They said that they would rather pay whole departments year round to erase a piece of music every 30 days and then re-record it, or re-download it, rather than pay the access fee, the mechanical right, once. It does not make a lot of business sense to me that someone would pay employees to sit there and erase every 30 days so they do not have to pay it and then re-record it, or re-download it so they have access to it, just to avoid the one time only payment for access, the purchase of the piece. They then went on to say that they had to pay for it twice. No, they pay for access, they pay for use fee.
Content is king. We have creators and it seems the government members have the idea that a hit song, any song, just appears out of the blue, that artists sit on a bus, get an idea for a great song and write it on the back of a ticket, or on a napkin. Napkins seem to get lambasted in the House quite a bit. Great ideas have been created on napkins. Then the song ends up on the radio.
Let us look at it from a different perspective, one that the government seems to understand, the perspective of a small business. An entrepreneur has an idea, a song. The entrepreneur develops the idea. The entrepreneur needs capital investment for both prototype and to move from concept to reality, which is the demo phase. This costs an artist a lot of money, either in renting recording space or in buying the equipment. This includes hiring individuals, a project manager, staff, equipment, facilities, delivery systems, marketing, packaging and there is distribution and the product of these sales.
Artists need to be remunerated. Artists depend on the back end to get remunerated. The back end is things like the mechanical rights, $21 million, private copying $30 million. It is not a question of choosing piracy over remuneration. It is a question of developing a bill that respects the rights of creators and ensures they are remunerated for the work that they do.
