Industry committee  I'm not an authority on copyright inherent in coding, but I think what you said off the top, about music being business, is very salient for this committee. This committee might think of creators as belonging to the heritage committee, because that's where we proposed the creativ

Industry committee  That's right. Each young artist who enters the marketplace could be thought of as a start-up. Our government has rightly accorded all kinds of benefits to technology start-ups, and that makes sense. What's missing and what we can add now to redress that balance is to focus on our

Industry committee  Good afternoon, and thank you for the opportunity to testify to this committee on behalf of Music Canada. This committee's review of the Copyright Act comes at a critical time for Canada's creators. It is a time when governments around the world are questioning whether the curre

Canadian Heritage committee  Right, sorry. Now we live in a streaming world and we have this problem with stream-ripping. What that means is you can get a very simple program that takes a stream and converts it to an MP3 file, which you then keep. The moment you do that you have destroyed the marketplace fo

Canadian Heritage committee  You are, and there is lots more the committee is going to hear from folks, and there is lots more that can be done, but if you're looking for something immediate and something that harmonizes our laws and redresses ancient wrongs, these are the things to do.

Canadian Heritage committee  Absolutely, and I think that's why, if you look at the four suggestions we've made, you'll see that this is not really so much adapting to what the EU is doing at this moment. It's more catch-up, and that's the problem: we haven't caught up. We've let these old subsidies kick aro

Canadian Heritage committee  A lot of people felt that pirating went out the door with CD pirating. In fact, one of the most formidable challenges that we face today is stream-ripping. We all know we're living in a world where most people access their music through a service like Spotify, Deezer, or YouTube;

Canadian Heritage committee  One of the reasons we can protect it is just by how fantastically good it is and how good it has always been. It has always been able to stand on its own. It was assisted by Canadian content rules, but at the end of the day, what made those rules work was just how fricking good t

Canadian Heritage committee  It's a gigantic recommendation engine. It's not passive.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes. There's a chart in front of you that shows the shocking disparity of what happens when you create safe harbours. If you look at the chart here with the little bars on the left, you can see that you have paid, advertising-supported music, so that's Spotify, people who are sub

Canadian Heritage committee  Those are commercial arrangements. I was an artist lawyer for almost 15 years. In the case of the singer-songwriter, you would sign a record contract. The record contract would spell out royalty provisions, copyright, the amount of money that would flow to the artist, and what th

Canadian Heritage committee  We didn't have any input at all. This was a last-minute amendment that was added at 12 seconds to midnight so there was no real input. The rationale was that small, individual radio stations—mom-and-pop, as they were described—would be crippled by the addition of having to pay ro

Canadian Heritage committee  That's correct.

Canadian Heritage committee  I think we have to have a proper way to measure this. Instead of treating everybody the same—whether you're Bell Media or a small station in Saskatoon that is independently owned—we have to find a way to discriminate between the two. I don't think it's that difficult. I think you

Canadian Heritage committee  I do, but not with me today. We are prepared to put a proposal before the committee that would do that.