Canadian Heritage committee  Sure. I would like to say that there's this impression out there that licensing of creative material somehow stands in the way of access because there's a price on it. In fact, licensing is a way of creating access to materials in a fair way that is fair to everyone.

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you for the question, Mr. Housefather. Ironically, a lot of the members of The Writers' Union are teachers themselves, so they feel sort of stuck in the middle on this kind of thing. It really comes back to something that somebody was saying earlier, which was that there

Canadian Heritage committee  That's a very complicated question to analyze. Obviously, there are more factors than just copyright non-compliance at play. Books are, to a certain extent, old-fashioned technology, and we've been in competition with some pretty fancy and exciting new technologies as well. We f

Canadian Heritage committee  You're expressing a lot of confusion about the arguments against our making a living from our creative work, and believe me, I share your confusion. I've been arguing about copyright online for a good decade and a half, and I still don't understand why there is this reluctance to

Canadian Heritage committee  That's terrific. Thank you for the question, Mr. Louis. I just wanted to add to what Roanie was saying, because I'm busily paying these bills myself right now. I have two sons heading to university and I have to say that the university licence is $14.31 per student. I work in cu

Canadian Heritage committee  I appreciate that very much, Ms. Ien. I just wanted to elaborate a bit on what Roanie was saying about why we haven't had this seemingly simple solution yet. I think it's because on the education side they were convinced to take a huge gamble—to roll the dice—and with every pass

Canadian Heritage committee  We're The Writers' Union of Canada. We surveyed our members about their income—not just our members, but writers across the spectrum—and what we found was that there has been a sharp decline in income in the roughly 10 years since this exception was put in place. Incomes are dow

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you very much, Chair. Good morning. Thank you to the committee for the invitation to appear today. I'm speaking to you today from Tkaronto, on the north shore of Lake Ontario, which is bound by Dish With One Spoon, a treaty between the Anishinabe and the Haudenosaunee to

Canadian Heritage committee  Are you talking about the Copyright Board?

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes.

Canadian Heritage committee  Sure. Thanks. Yes, clearly we disagree on the issue of fair dealing. To hit a couple of the points I heard, it's true that lots of factors go into the decline in income for authors and it's true that digital disruption is a large part of that, but we have now tracked a 27% decre