Industry committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, members of the committee. My name is Eric Baptiste, and I am the chief executive officer of SOCAN. I am joined this morning by Gilles Daigle, SOCAN's general counsel. SOCAN is a society that administers public performance rights o

Industry committee  Clearly, we support charitable causes. Our members—Canada's creators and music publishers—are the first to provide free licences for benefit concerts in cases such as the Calgary floods or the Lac-Mégantic tragedy. However, the charitable objective of certain organizations is l

Industry committee  Perhaps I can add to this. I believe SOCAN has about 5,000 publisher members. Most of them are small to extremely small businesses. The copyrights they control that creators have asked them to administer or promote are their assets. The shorter duration of the Canadian term of p

Industry committee  Of course. I'm going to let my colleague Gilles Daigle answer that.

Industry committee  Sure, this remains an issue. It is maybe not as central as it used to be a few years ago before streaming services opened shop in Canada. There was a vacuum in this country for a while, and we developed, as a result, an unhealthy appetite for those websites that supply unlicensed

Industry committee  One measure that would benefit every company and individual in the Canadian music ecosystem is an extension of term. It doesn't matter whether you live in Toronto or in rural Ontario, Quebec, or B.C., each of the 150,000 members of SOCAN, publishers and creators, would benefit fr

Industry committee  That's perfect. If you don't stream that much in rural Canada, and you enjoy music, you're probably likely to copy more music, to cache more music on your devices. If you want to stick to the stereotypes, and you enjoy your country music, then more country music will be stored lo

Industry committee  What about exceptions for the Beijing treaty? I believe it's one of the most recent WIPO, World Intellectual Property Organization, treaties that addresses people with visual or hearing problems. I'm not a lawyer, but I believe that we need to make sure that every Canadian has a

Industry committee  I'm not a lawyer; I qualified my answer.

Industry committee  We're not here to ask for subsidies or funds. The interim proposal in the private copying submission is just that, an interim or bridge measure. In an ideal world, what you would like Parliament to do is to just change the language to make sure that the Copyright Act has a privat

Industry committee  That is a very important point. We are enjoying an amazing time in Canada. We have global superstars who dominate the music scene, and most people here would share my view that the Canadian content elements put in place have helped create an environment that is conducive for thes

Industry committee  I've got my CDs, and right now I understand that the Beijing treaty is about audiovisual performances. To the best of my knowledge, we have no issue in the music business with the Beijing treaty. Maybe other witnesses you've seen here from the TV or movie industry have issues wit

Industry committee  You did your homework, and thank you very much for your interest. Yes, at SOCAN we believe very much in transparency and accuracy. We are obsessed about data points. We believe we hold, through our efforts, one of the world's best databases of sound recordings. We control the in

Industry committee  I don't believe there's an issue there. We have more of an issue in licensing because of the myriads of exceptions. Distribution is the thing we do. We care deeply about this. Our members, my 150,000 or so writers and publishers, would be mad at me if we didn't try very hard to b

Industry committee  If I may say, fees are pretty important. One example at SOCAN is international revenue. We have agreements with a 100 organizations around the world. We received $76 million last year from around the world—from the U.S., Germany, France, and the U.K. Our fee on this is zero. We b