HERI Committee Meeting

37th PARLIAMENT, 2nd SESSION

Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage

EVIDENCE

CONTENTS

Wednesday, October 29, 2003

¹

1535

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard (Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia, Lib.))

Mr. Paul Jones (Research and Education Officer, Canadian Association of University Teachers)

¹

1540

¹

1545

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard)

Ms. Roanie Levy (Director, Legal Affairs and Government Relations, Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency)

¹

1550

¹

1555

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard)

Ms. Jacqueline Hushion (Executive Director, Canadian Publishers' Council)

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard)

Ms. Jacqueline Hushion

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1600

º

1605

Ms. Catherine Campbell (Publishing Consultant, Canadian Publishers' Council)

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard)

Mr. Harvey Weiner (Deputy Secretary General, Canadian Teachers' Federation)

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1610

º

1615

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard)

Ms. Christiane Gagnon (Québec, BQ)

Mr. Harvey Weiner

º

1620

Ms. Christiane Gagnon

Mr. Harvey Weiner

Mr. Paul Jones

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard)

Ms. Roanie Levy

º

1625

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard)

Mr. Harvey Weiner

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard)

Mr. Paul Bonwick (Simcoe—Grey, Lib.)

Ms. Roanie Levy

º

1630

Mr. Paul Bonwick

Mr. Paul Jones

Mr. Paul Bonwick

Mr. Paul Jones

Mr. Paul Bonwick

Mr. Paul Jones

Mr. Paul Bonwick

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1635

Mr. Paul Jones

Mr. Harvey Weiner

Mr. Paul Bonwick

Mr. Harvey Weiner

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard)

Ms. Wendy Lill (Dartmouth, NDP)

Mr. Harvey Weiner

Ms. Wendy Lill

Ms. Wendy Lill

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1640

Mr. Harvey Weiner

Ms. Wendy Lill

Mr. Paul Jones

Ms. Wendy Lill

Ms. Roanie Levy

Ms. Jacqueline Hushion

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard)

Mr. Alex Shepherd (Durham, Lib.)

Ms. Roanie Levy

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1645

Mr. Alex Shepherd

Ms. Roanie Levy

Mr. Alex Shepherd

Ms. Roanie Levy

Mr. Alex Shepherd

Ms. Roanie Levy

Mr. Alex Shepherd

Ms. Roanie Levy

Mr. Alex Shepherd

Ms. Roanie Levy

Mr. Paul Jones

Mr. Alex Shepherd

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1650

Mr. Paul Jones

Ms. Jacqueline Hushion

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard)

Mr. Paul Jones

Ms. Roanie Levy

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard)

Ms. Roanie Levy

º

1655

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard)

Ms. Roanie Levy

Ms. Jacqueline Hushion

Ms. Roanie Levy

Mr. Paul Jones

Ms. Catherine Campbell

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard)

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard)

Ms. Wendy Lill

Ms. Catherine Campbell

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1700

Ms. Jacqueline Hushion

Mr. Paul Jones

Ms. Wendy Lill

Mr. Paul Jones

»

1705

Ms. Jacqueline Hushion

Ms. Catherine Campbell

Mr. Paul Jones

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard)

Mr. Paul Bonwick

Ms. Roanie Levy

»

1710

Mr. Paul Bonwick

Ms. Roanie Levy

Mr. Paul Bonwick

Mr. Paul Jones

Mr. Paul Bonwick

Ms. Roanie Levy

»

1715

Mr. Harvey Weiner

Mr. Paul Jones

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard)

Ms. Carole-Marie Allard (Laval East, Lib.)

Ms. Roanie Levy

Ms. Carole-Marie Allard

Ms. Roanie Levy

Ms. Carole-Marie Allard

Ms. Roanie Levy

»

1720

Ms. Carole-Marie Allard

Ms. Jacqueline Hushion

Ms. Carole-Marie Allard

Ms. Jacqueline Hushion

Ms. Carole-Marie Allard

Ms. Jacqueline Hushion

Ms. Carole-Marie Allard

Ms. Jacqueline Hushion

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard)

Mr. Alex Shepherd

»

1725

Ms. Roanie Levy

Mr. Alex Shepherd

Ms. Roanie Levy

Mr. Alex Shepherd

Ms. Roanie Levy

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard)

Mr. Harvey Weiner

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard)

Ms. Roanie Levy

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard)

Mr. Paul Jones

»

1730

Mr. Harvey Weiner

Ms. Jacqueline Hushion

Ms. Roanie Levy

The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard)

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CANADA

Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage

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NUMBER 054

l

2nd SESSION

l

37th PARLIAMENT

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EVIDENCE

Wednesday, October 29, 2003

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

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[English]

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard (Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia, Lib.)): Members, we are going to begin our meeting this afternoon pursuant to the order of reference of Tuesday, November 5, 2002, and section 92 of the Copyright Act, a statutory review of the act.

    Today we're going to be hearing witnesses from four organizations: the Canadian Association of University Teachers, represented by Paul Jones, research and education officer; the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, Roanie Levy, director, legal affairs and government relations; the Canadian Publishers' Council, Jacqueline Hushion, executive director, and Catherine Campbell, publishing consultant; and the Canadian Teachers' Federation, Harvey Weiner, deputy secretary general.

    My understanding is that each organization will get 10 minutes, or perhaps less, depending on how concise you are, and then of course we will have rounds of questions.

    Does Paul Jones want to start? Fire away.

    Mr. Paul Jones (Research and Education Officer, Canadian Association of University Teachers): Good afternoon.

    Thank you for inviting our organization. We welcome this opportunity to appear before the committee and participate in the shaping of the Copyright Act.

    My organization, the Canadian Association of University Teachers, is a national organization. It has about 32,000 members. It represents university and college teachers, librarians, and researchers at institutions all across Canada.

    The CAUT membership has a dual role with respect to copyright. They are creators and they're also users. Our belief is that this brings a unique perspective to the discussion of copyright.

    As an organization, we understand the importance of copyright law as a way to protect the artistic and literary works that our members create, but we also see copyright law as an expression of public policy, essentially concerned with ensuring that Canadians have access to works, because this access plays a central role in our members' jobs as teachers and as researchers and also in the creation of new works.

    It's our understanding that this series of meetings is not directed at a highly technical discussion of copyright but rather is looking for some broad strokes about how the reform process should proceed.

    One of the things the committee has asked is what the witnesses think the guiding principles should be that steer this process. In our view, the guiding principle should be balance. The Copyright Act has to address the needs of both creators and users and thereby serve the interests of all Canadians.

    To find this balance, I think it's important that some misunderstandings be addressed. The first misunderstanding, I believe, is that the Copyright Act only exists to serve the interests of owners of works. Our organization believes this isn't true.

    Why do we think that? The first reason is parliamentary intention as expressed through the structure of the act. If the point of the act were only to serve the interests of owners, then the term of copyright would be infinite and there would be no public domain, no exceptions, and no fair dealing.

    As we know, however, there is a finite limit on copyright, and through various exceptions and fair dealing, the rights of copyright holders are limited. This balance is incorporated into the very structure of the act: rights for owners traded off with exceptions and fair dealing for users.

    The second reason we know the Copyright Act does not simply exist to funnel money into the pockets of people who own works is the judicial interpretation of the act. In the recent Supreme Court case of Théberge, the court discussed the need for balance between promoting the public interest in dissemination of works and obtaining a just reward for creators.

    The court stated:

The proper balance among these and other public policy objectives lies not only in recognizing the creator's rights but in giving due weight to their limited nature.

    In crassly economic terms, it would be as inefficient to overcompensate artists and authors for the right of reproduction as it would be self-defeating to undercompensate them.

    The court also said:

Excessive control by holders of copyrights and other forms of intellectual property may unduly limit the ability of the public domain to incorporate and embellish creative innovation in the long-term interests of society as a whole, or create practical obstacles to proper utilization.

    Clearly, Parliament and the courts have spoken. The Copyright Act is about balance, and our organization believes this has to be kept foremost in mind as the Canadian Parliament proceeds forward.

    The second misunderstanding that we would like to address is the notion that the Copyright Act is currently not strong enough. There is a belief that the act favours the user communities--in particular the education community--at the expense of creators and owners. Again, we believe this notion is wrong. Canada's copyright laws are currently very strong.

    An example is teaching. In the United States, which is a good comparator to Canada, with a similar culture and no shrinking violet when it comes to strong copyright protection, the “fair use” doctrine includes the right of teachers to make multiple mechanical copies for classroom use. Canadian law, on the other hand, allows us to make a manual reproduction of a work onto a dry-erase board, flip chart, or other similar surface intended for displaying handwritten material.

    This education exception, or the lack of an education exception, is one example of the tightness of Canadian law. But if you look across a number of other fields at exceptions for libraries, archives, and museums, and you compare those with other countries in the English-speaking world, again Canada's legislation is the most restrictive. The fact is, as it is now, Canada has very tight laws. They should be balanced. Balance is the underlying foundation of the act, but the act currently isn't balanced. In this round of reform, to refine that balance, we believe some of the demands of owners are going to have to be rebuffed and some of the interests of users are going to have to be addressed.

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    The committee has also requested some comments about the comprehensiveness of the list of major issues to be addressed, together with a timeframe for action. In examining what needs to be done and when it needs to be done, we suggest the following three principles: first, don't legislate where legislation is unnecessary; second, in instances where legislation may be necessary, proceed carefully; and third, do not be afraid to take a uniquely Canadian approach.

    As an example of the first principle, which is don't legislate unnecessarily, the issue of the extension of term protection comes to mind. The EU and the U.S. have increased term protection to life plus 70 years. In Canada it's still life plus 50 years. Our view is that this extension is a bad idea. It will not encourage creativity. It's directed primarily at increasing the profits of large commercial rights holders. It also reflects a fundamental hypocrisy in that the backers of the scheme will remain free to delve into the past to enhance their own content, but writers and artists in future generations will have this same opportunity sharply curtailed.

    The second principle is that in instances where legislation may be necessary, it's important to proceed cautiously and slowly and to legislate to address genuine problems, not to protect obsolete business models or to expand the control of rights holders. A good example of this is TPMs, or technical protection measures.

    One of the great benefits of digital technology is that it allows people to rapidly copy and distribute information, but the flip side of this is that it also allows people to infringe on a massive scale. Because of this infringing activity, or in part because of this infringing activity, owners are putting technical protection measures such as encryption into their works.

    There is a demand that these encryption measures be protected and that circumventing them be made illegal, and that even the devices that allow the circumvention be made illegal. This sounds like common sense, but common sense doesn't always lead in the right direction.

    Encryption can prevent illegal, unauthorized copying, but it can also prevent a whole range of statutory rights of access, fair dealing, the exceptions, and it can even prevent things from going to the public domain. So an absolute ban on TPMs and TPM-circumventing devices would render meaningless many of the rights guaranteed to Canadians in the act. So here we urge you to proceed cautiously and carefully on this difficult issue.

    On the third principle, which is do not be afraid of taking a uniquely Canadian approach, the Canadian government in the last year has made some dramatic decisions that have fallen in the face of continental opinion and in some cases world opinion. Examples are the refusal to go to war in Iraq, the extension of the blessing of marriage to gays and lesbians, and steps towards decriminalizing marijuana. Contrary to predictions, the sky has not fallen as a result of these things. Rather, Canada's credibility around the world has been enhanced.

    We urge the committee to extend this creativity into the copyright realm. Something that would really be ground setting and important and that would serve as an example around the world would be placing limits on contractual interference with exceptions and uses.

    The problem our members are encountering, and I think all Canadians are encountering, are unilateral “take it or leave it” contracts, shrinkwrap licences, that force users to sign away access to rights guaranteed by the Parliament of Canada.

    Our organization urges the committee to confront this issue by adopting legislative amendments that limit contracts from overriding statutory guaranteed exceptions and fair dealing.

    Parliament could find uniquely Canadian approaches to copyright issues, rather than simply being frog-marched along by international forces. That's one example.

    In conclusion, as society and technology changes, the Copyright Act also has to change, but through this change there has to be one thing that remains constant, and that is that the act has to balance the needs of both users and owners.

    Digital technology presents a special challenge to Parliament in this regard. On one hand, the committee and Parliament have to ensure that digital technology is not used to undermine legitimate copyright. On the other hand, they also have to ensure that digital technology is not used by copyright owners to impose total restrictions on access to works. It's a difficult task. People have to listen to other points of view and have to be open to new ideas. If this happens, we can meet the needs of copyright owners and copyright users and thereby serve the interests of all Canadians.

    Thank you.

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    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard): Thank you very much, Mr. Jones.

    Now we're going to ask Ms. Levy, director of legal affairs and government relations with the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency for her presentation.

    Thank you for coming.

    Ms. Roanie Levy (Director, Legal Affairs and Government Relations, Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency): Thank you.

    As requested by the committee, I will also limit my comments to the comprehensiveness of issues as well as to a timeframe.

    However, before I start, I would like to briefly explain the role of collective societies. In other words, why do collective societies exist today? In which way are they helpful to copyright holders and copyright users? Believe it or not, I can answer these questions with just one word. Then I would like to outline access copyright accomplishments in the analog world, and that, to us, means the paper world as well as the digital world.

    Why do collective societies exist and how are they helpful to copyright owners as well as to copyright users? Here is my one-word answer: access. Yes, that is why we changed our name about 18 months ago from CANCOPY to Access Copyright.

    Access, simply put, is what collective societies are about. First, collective societies provide access to copyright holders by opening up markets that otherwise would be very difficult to serve. So it's access to copyright users and access to royalties for the use of their works.

    Second, collective societies provide users easy and affordable access to copyright-protected works. It is easy because collective societies essentially are a one-stop clearing house for copyright works, and it is affordable because collective societies' licences greatly reduce transaction cost and they are better priced than individual licences because of economies of scale.

    Again, we are talking about easy and affordable access by users to copyright-protected works. As you can see, really the bottom line here is about money, and the great thing about collective licensing is that money actually flows both ways. There is more money going to the copyright owners and there is less cost or less money spent by the copyright users.

    If collective societies are about access and the basket one issues, those issues described in the section 92 review report as being of a short-term priority, including access and education issues, why then is collective rights management in basket two, or the mid-term issues? This is an important question that I will come back to in a moment.

    First I will mention a little more about Access Copyright.

    As I mentioned earlier, we were previously known as CANCOPY. People would ask, “Can copy? Don't you mean can't copy?” That is not what we meant and that is not why we were created. We were created in 1988 by Canadian creators and publishers precisely to provide a mechanism that would permit--and I repeat permit--the legal photocopying of their works.

    At the time, photocopying was rampant in the education sector, in government, in for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, and all the photocopying that was done was done illegally, or mostly illegally. The creators and publishers realized they would not be able to stop the photocopying from happening. More importantly, they actually did not want to stop the photocopying from happening, because what the photocopying told them was there was a demand for the use of parts of their works. And any demand for their works, whether it be parts of the works or the entire works, was actually quite welcome and to some extent encouraged.

    What was important for their market to be able to continue and to flourish was this. It was necessary that the demand for copying would be met while ensuring that their copyright was respected and that they received fair remuneration for the use of their works.

    This is reasonable; it's sensible. So CANCOPY was created. It is now known as Access Copyright.

    Access Copyright's membership today includes 35 creator and publisher associations. We represent over 5,500 Canadian creators, including authors, photographers, and illustrators, and over 520 book, magazine, and newspaper publishers. Our repertoire of works is both domestic and international. And thanks to bilateral agreements with 19 countries, Access Copyright's repertoire includes 1.2 million domestic works and several million international works.

    Rights holders have accessed almost $100 million in royalties since the creation of Access Copyright. Last year alone, Access Copyright distributed almost $19 million in royalties. Users, on the other hand, have accessed copyright-protected works through quick, easy, and affordable licensing solutions. The users include the federal government, provincial governments, municipalities, all kindergarten to grade 12 schools, post-secondary institutions, libraries, corporations, and not-for-profit organizations. In fact, the photocopying done by the members of this committee is covered under an Access Copyright licence. Literally millions of users access millions of copyright-protected works every year through Access Copyright.

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    So what are we doing about digital? There is no doubt that there is a huge demand for access to works in digital form and for digital uses. Similar to what we saw with photocopying, the demand is there—and the creators and publishers do want to meet those demands. Again, as with photocopying, they need to ensure that their copyright is respected and they receive fair remuneration for the use of their works. However, for this to happen effectively in a digital world, there needs to be a better framework in Canada for collective societies than currently exists.

    The rights holders also need the added security offered by the WIPO copyright treaties. I will say more on this in a moment.

    While we wait for WIPO ratification and a collective licensing regime better suited for the digital world, we have not remained idle. To be able to meet the demands of the digital users, Access Copyright embarked on a very aggressive campaign to obtain digital rights from its creators and publishers. This campaign has been very successful; almost all of our affiliates have granted us those rights.

    Last year, Access Copyright launched a rights management system called the RMS, which issues transactional licences online. At the core of the RMS is a comprehensive digital graphic database of Canadian published works. This is the largest of its kind in Canada. Today, print and digital works can be licensed by Access Copyright for digital uses, such as scanning, e-mailing, intranet, and Internet posting. All of this can be done online, as I mentioned.

    Publishers and creators in Canada have spent time and money—in fact lots of money—in order to meet the digital needs of users. Notwithstanding that, Access Copyright is still not in a position to offer comprehensive licences for digital uses—not without copyright reform. These licences are the large all-encompassing ones the institutions need.

    I am sure it is clear to you by now that copyright management is really the other side of the access and education issue; they are two sides of the same coin. In my opinion, collective management is the solution to the access issue, and in order to maintain the integrity of the Copyright Act, it is imperative that these issues be dealt with simultaneously. Failure to do so may result in recommendations being made without a complete understanding of the current and potential roles of collective societies. Such recommendations may deprive rights holders of legitimate licensing revenues, or even worse, they may expropriate the rights of rights holders altogether.

    As in the past, the user community, in particular the education sector, will ask for exceptions to copyright in order to access works. This time it is for the Internet use of works. Given their highly public profile, they are driven by a concern to comply with the law. They believe the only way they will be able to comply with the law is if exceptions are introduced into the Copyright Act. The truth is that there are other ways for users to comply with the law without expropriating rights holders.

    Collective licensing, as has been demonstrated, works in the paper world, and it could work in a digital world as well. Collective licensing can provide users with an easy and affordable way of complying with the law. Collective licensing can remove all uncertainty regarding the use of the Internet—and as long as collective licensing is available, exemptions are simply not necessary.

    So how should the act be amended so that collective licensing can work better in a digital world? It should be amended by introducing an extended collective licensing regime, which would facilitate the granting of comprehensive licences for digital works and digital uses.

    How does an extended collective licensing regime work? When a substantial number of rights holders agree to work through a collective, the repertoire of the collective is extended to incorporate the other rights in the same category. The benefits of extended collective licensing include the acceleration of the acquisition of rights. They also include providing users access to a wider repertoire of works; they expose both the users and collectives to less risk; and they increase the efficiency and promptness of royalty collection.

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    The act should also be amended to set the stage for ratification of WIPO.

    In summary, collective licensing has met the access needs in the analog world and is well suited to continue to do so in the digital world.

    Thank you.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard): Thank you, Ms. Levy. You're pretty well on time--10 minutes and 32 seconds. Thank you very much.

    We're now going to go to the Canadian Publishers' Council.

    Who might be speaking? Is it Jacqueline?

    Ms. Jacqueline Hushion (Executive Director, Canadian Publishers' Council): We both are.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard): Okay, go ahead.

    Ms. Jacqueline Hushion: I'm starting to feel like a veteran before this committee. It's very nice to be here again and to see you all.

    The members of the Canadian Publishers' Council are most pleased to have this opportunity to meet with members of the committee to consider important questions of copyright policy and reform.

    As I'm sure many of you know, our council was founded in 1910. It is the oldest national trade association representing publishers of all types of material, in all genre, in all formats, who sell their works through every available channel in Canada and internationally.

    Our members publish elementary and secondary textbooks and other learning resources. They publish college, university, and post-graduate textbooks and ancillary materials, works of general interest, fiction and non-fiction, and works of reference. They publish in book form, in electronic form, as online databases, and on the Internet.

    We know you are familiar with the many challenges of reforming Canada's Copyright Act and with the exacerbation of those challenges that arise from technological advancement. Our corporate members are investing in the development and dissemination of content. They want that content to be as broadly accessible as practicable. They need assurance that they will have the opportunity to earn a return on that investment and that they will be able to fulfill their contractual obligations with their authors.

    Copyright is the foundation upon which our industry--our cultural industry--is built.

    The Government of Canada assessment of the operation of the Copyright Act has provided us with the Report on the Provisions and Operation of the Copyright Act. It contains the matrix entitled “Legislative Work Ahead” that charts the myriad issues that need to be addressed, and it proposes a three-stage reform agenda.

    We believe the key issues for copyright reform have in fact been identified. We believe there are interconnections and relationships between issues that make phasing into these three stages, with clear lines of demarcation, quite difficult. We will illustrate this in the balance of our remarks.

    Our remarks are limited to four areas: access and education, collective rights management, database protection, and the WIPO Copyright Treaty.

    We addressed photography issues and crown copyright in our submission to the committee, and the Canadian Copyright Institute addressed term of protection in some detail in its submission.

    First, on access, education, and collective management issues, I am a member of the government's Council on Access to Information for Print-Disabled Canadians, which is hosted by the National Library of Canada.

    Publishers first became involved in the concept of a clearing house, a national clearing house, for print-disabled Canadians when a report was commissioned by a book industry organization called the Book and Periodical Council. Their report, Options for Making Published Works More Accessible to the Visually Impaired, was released in 1998. Our association's members unanimously subscribe to the launch of such a clearing house that will forge links between publishers and alternate format producers, support digital rights management for electronic text, and help to develop standards to facilitate the efficient production and distribution of electronic text for the print-disabled. However, its continued success in these initiatives is dependent upon content producers' ability to control their intellectual property.

    Secondly, on access and education, collective rights management, the Canadian Publishers' Council recently participated in a working group on educational uses of the Internet, jointly sponsored by the Department of Canadian Heritage and Industry Canada. Catherine Campbell and I were both at that table, as was Roanie Levy representing Access Copyright.

    We stated clearly in that forum that publishers want students and educators to gain from the use of the Internet. Publishers will not, however, invest in content specifically designed for this new medium--and that's what it is, a medium--unless they have confidence that Internet commerce is secure, that their rights are respected, and that they, again, have the opportunity to earn a reasonable return on their investment.

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    We believe students and educators will be well served by collective administrators such as Access Copyright. Collective licensing provides convenience and ease of access to information, but also to bibliographic data and to metadata--data about data--to information.

    Many publishers, many of our corporate members, have now granted rights to Access Copyright to manage their works in a digital environment. They have moved beyond permissions through Access Copyright for a print environment.

    In order for the collective approach to address consumers' needs, Copyright Act amendments are required to limit the collective's liability in the administration of copyright works--and Roanie Levy addressed this a few moments ago. That said, the collective must align its activities to the full interests, not just the monetary interests, of rights holders whose property it represents: the members of our council.

    Publishers are prepared to visit and to revisit access issues with their customers, the consumers of copyright material.

    Our council has conducted research on the implications of extending print exceptions into a digital environment or creating new ones. The implications to the rights holders' ability to manage uses of their intellectual property were disturbing. We are prepared to share those findings with the members of this committee as a follow-up to this hearing, if you wish.

    It is important that policy issues related to access and education be considered in the context of collective rights management. The government's proposed phasing has separated them between short- and medium-term considerations. These issues are connected in that one--collective management--provides solutions for the other--publishers being able to make their works broadly accessible.

    Catherine.

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    Ms. Catherine Campbell (Publishing Consultant, Canadian Publishers' Council): Thank you.

    I'm going to speak to the issue of database protection and the legislative changes required to implement the WIPO treaties.

    On the issue of database protection, the section 92 report stated:

Recent court decisions suggest that the selection and arrangement of the underlying works or data must be sufficiently “original” to qualify for protection.

    Canada must be compliant with the core articles of the WIPO World Copyright Treaty before Canada is in a position to implement that treaty. Those articles explicitly reference database protection. The Canadian Publishers' Council members do not believe that Canada adequately protects databases. As we noted in our written submission at some length, conflicting judicial decisions and legal opinions illustrate this point very clearly. In fact, there is a suggestion internationally that since Canada does not provide clear protection for databases, no reciprocal protections will be afforded to Canadian databases.

    The Government of Canada must address this longstanding issue and provide clear legislative protection for databases on the basis of skill, judgment, or labour invested to produce those databases in order to protect the continued investment in this major element of the digital marketplace.

    The whole question of databases I just referenced ties into the legislative changes required for the WIPO World Copyright Treaty. Implementation of the WIPO treaties is essential for the growth and competitiveness of the Canadian intellectual properties sector. Canada must address, concurrently with copyright reform and digital issues, implementation of the treaty.

    There are a few remaining issues that must be addressed to put our copyright law in compliance with the WIPO treaties. We believe these are primarily moral rights for performers and ownership and term of protection for photographers, and as cited a moment ago, database issues are relevant to Canada's compliance.

    However, database protection is slated for the third phase of copyright reform, while the copyright treaty is in the first phase. We see these as inextricably connected. Canada cannot afford to be left outside the extensive community of contracting countries that extend the protection of their digital copyright laws to each other. Canada's creators, performers, and producers will not have all the benefits available to copyright owners in those countries.

    The WIPO treaties also expressly require national laws that provide effective, expeditious remedies sufficient to constitute a real deterrent to infringement.

    The treaties will not, as some claim, cause producers to lock down more information or impede access to information. To the contrary, the treaties will open new opportunities for all creators and producers, as well as for academia, science, and research.

    The Canadian Publishers' Council is involved in the Copyright Coalition of Creators and Producers, which has more than 34 national organizations as members. The coalition has submitted a major proposal on implementation of the WIPO treaties to Canadian Heritage and Industry Canada. That document is available on request.

    We would refer you also for a more detailed presentation on the database legal issues to our submission of September 15.

    Thank you for hearing us. We will be pleased to answer questions.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard): Thank you very much.

    We'll conclude the presentation with Mr. Weiner.

    Mr. Harvey Weiner (Deputy Secretary General, Canadian Teachers' Federation): Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

    We, too, would like to thank you for the opportunity to present our views on the issues affecting copyright legislation.

[Translation]

    The Canadian Teachers' Federation is the national voice of teachers in promoting high quality education, the status of teachers and equality of opportunity through public education. Through its 14 provincial and territorial member organizations, CTF collectively represents over 240,000 teachers in primary and secondary schools across Canada.

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[English]

    I would like to emphasize a number of points in this presentation, and obviously I'd be prepared in the discussion to elaborate on them.

    I would like to support and reinforce the comments made by my colleague from the Canadian Association of University Teachers on the issue of balance, which to us is the most critical aspect of copyright legislation. My colleague referred to a fairly recent Supreme Court decision on the Théberge case, which I think specifically addresses the purpose, which is sometimes forgotten, of copyright legislation. It is the difficult and unenviable--and having participated in discussions on copyright legislation for the past 16 years, I am well aware of that--but nevertheless extremely important task of trying to achieve balance between the rights of creators and users and take into account, and this is essential, the public interest.

    I'll reiterate the points my colleague made because of the comments that were subsequently made by the next speaker.

    The Copyright Act is supposed to promote a balance between the public interest and the encouragement and dissemination of the works of the arts and intellect and also provide just reward for the creator. To quote from the Supreme Court of Canada judgment in the Théberge case, “The proper balance among these and other public policy objectives lies not only in recognizing the creator's rights but in giving due weight to their limited nature.”

    I reiterate it because access is not an alternative to balanced copyright legislation. Balanced copyright legislation must be fair and equitable and must take into account the needs of both users and creators. Collective licensing is part of the solution, but it is not the solution. It is not the panacea that will create the balance, and if in fact it were simply a question of licence, then the copyright legislation and the economy of that legislation would have been very, very different.

    Our federation and others we have worked with that look at these issues and try to take into account the interest of users as well as creators is not and has never been interested in expropriating the rights of creators. Educational organizations across the country are currently spending in excess of $20 million per annum to create access to materials that creators expressly want to be remunerated for. We believe that is fair, and we believe we should continue to remunerate creators fairly for materials they wish to be remunerated for.

    We have put forward what we call an “education amendment”. It has a limited but very important purview, a purview we believe should be part of the legislative framework of the Copyright Act. This amendment is carefully worded to apply simply to materials that are posted on the Internet, with the intent that they be widely accessed and shared, with no express expectation on the part of the creators that they be remunerated for those materials, and exclusively to participants in a program of learning under the authority of an educational institution. This, we believe, is extremely important for a number of reasons.

    We are not, as classroom teachers, directly involved in negotiation of collective licences, nor of course--other than in the points we make to committees such as this--in the actual drafting of the technical language that provides the hoped for balance in copyright legislation. But we do face daily situations in the classroom with our students.

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    It is absolutely essential for us to be able to benefit from the teachable moment. That involves the discussion of and the ability to use materials in a timely fashion without going through loads of red tape identifying and contacting copyright owners. In instances where those owners have indicated they wish to be remunerated and are represented by a collective and the works are part of that collective, we certainly see it as being fair, just, and reasonable that they be compensated and remunerated. But when no such indication is there, we believe such access should be an entitlement for the educational users, the students, and the teachers within the classroom context.

    We also want to make the point that it is extremely important that government look at policy in a coherent fashion. If I may, I'll suggest that it means looking at it from a cross-departmental perspective. It is a fact that the federal government has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in projects designed to develop Internet skills among Canadian students, and current policy, reflected in copyright law, makes illegal much of what students do under these federally funded projects. We have to assume that the federal government, in providing the funds to wire schools from coast to coast to coast, was not simply doing so to create a commercial market for materials that creators do not wish to be remunerated for and that should be and are in fact in the public interest.

    I would also like to briefly refer to the WIPO treaty and the concern our organization has about the recommendation of this committee that a bill on WIPO treaty ratification be tabled by February 10, 2004. We believe strongly that it's important to get our own copyright house in order and that we deal in a comprehensive way with the copyright issues that are currently before this particular committee.

    We think it is a myth that Canada is lagging behind. To the best of our knowledge, there are only two “western”—shall we say—industrialized countries, Japan and the U.S.A., that have ratified. They are currently, we understand, experiencing some difficulties with this particular legislation.

    We would also suggest there are complexities involved in the consideration of copyright legislation that go beyond just copyright itself. There is other legislation that can and in fact should be taken into account, as should, of course, the impact it has on all stakeholders. Our question is, what's the rush? We believe there are a number of things that can and should be done internally before we move on to ratification of that particular WIPO treaty.

    I will stop at that particular point. If there are questions that members have on any of those points, I would be delighted to try to answer them.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard): Thank you, Mr. Weiner.

    Now we'll go to questions. Given the fact that the official opposition is not here, I'll start with Ms. Gagnon of the Bloc, followed by Mr. Bonwick on the government side. I assume Ms. Lill will have a question, so she will come third, and I guess, Mr. Shepherd, if you have questions, you can come fourth.

    We will start with you, Christiane.

[Translation]

    Ms. Christiane Gagnon (Québec, BQ): Thank you for coming here today to discuss with us copyright issues, an area that is rather complex for a neophyte like myself.

    Mr. Weiner, new Internet technology provides broad access to print material. Have you calculated the royalties that would have to be paid to authors should broader access to such material be granted to educators? Have you tried to gauge the impact this would have in terms of royalties?

    Mr. Harvey Weiner: Obviously, it's quite difficult to put a dollar figure on royalties, but a great deal of non copyright protected material is available over the Internet. What we need is reasonable legislation. We believe our proposal is reasonable and that it would guarantee access to a number of issues that, as far as we are concerned, are non-negotiable. Material that should be available at no cost should not be part of any negotiating licensing agreement. Elsewhere, we agree that provision needs to be made to remunerate authors fairly for their works.

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    Ms. Christiane Gagnon: For example, it's well known that in the education field, many professors are also authors. Has your request been well received? My question is also directed to Mr. Jones, who is also involved in education. Do educators feel their rights as authors are threatened by a request such as this?

    Mr. Harvey Weiner: Not at all, because they understand that our proposal would entitle them to seek remuneration for their work, if they so wish.

[English]

    Mr. Paul Jones: Maybe I can speak to that as the representative of the university professors.

    University professors are creators who produce an enormous amount of literary and artistic works, but they are a different kind of creator in some ways because their main remuneration comes through a salary. Some earn additional moneys through royalties, licensing, or direct sale—sometimes a lot—but mostly it's a secondary thing.

    The concern with copyright for our membership is mostly about being able to control our academic creativity vis-à-vis the university administration or vis-à-vis the private sector. It's a concern for academic freedom: to be able to write what you want and control the product. When it's completed, it's often not sold. Some of it goes to publishers to be sold as textbooks, but a lot of material that our membership produces is given free of charge to publishing companies to reproduce in literary and scholarly journals.

    The issue is not so much whether we're going to lose money from it; it's whether we're going to lose control over what we want to do with it. There is a big push on now among our members to circumvent the publishing industry and place stuff directly into the public's hand through our own initiatives at direct publishing, to make stuff available free through the Internet.

    For us, the Internet is seen as a wonderful opportunity to make available an enormous amount of material for the benefit of the whole world; for the purpose of adding to the knowledge base of all humanity, not to make money.

    To try to quickly sum up, the money is not a big issue.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard): I think Ms. Levy wants to say something.

    Ms. Roanie Levy: There's one point I'd like to make to ensure that we have full clarification of our different perspectives at the table.

    With respect to the first question, which has to do with what impact an exception would have on freely accessible works, it's actually quite an important issue. The impact, as Mr. Weiner mentioned, is not quantified right now, and the reason why is because it could potentially be actually quite large, depending on how big the exception is and which uses are permitted.

    Let me bring something to the table. When the educators refer to publicly available, there is a different way of seeing what is publicly available. The initial premise that one should go on is that copyright exists in these works that are on the Internet, unless they are in the public domain or copyright has expressly been waived. If not, the assumption is that copyright exists. Then the question is a question of intent, and Mr. Weiner referred to the intent that they be widely accessed.

    It is true that often works are put online with the intent that they be widely accessed, with the intent that they be perused and perhaps printed for personal use. Beyond that, I do not think there is any way of extending the intention. And that is quite critical. It is not because someone did not put a technical protection measure or password protection on something that they intend to be used for educational purposes.

    I'll give you a few examples. Some of our own rights holders have websites. Photographers and freelance writers will have websites that they will use to expose their works. They want it to be publicly accessed as widely as possible. They don't want to put TPM, they don't want to put password protection, because that would limit access and that is not what they want.

    However, the only intent that you could draw from their website is that they want you to browse it and perhaps print it for personal use. They certainly do not want you, at least most of them, to use it for educational purposes, at least not without prior authorization and in some instances payment as well.

    So even though the work is publicly available, it is not available for any use, and you cannot read into the intention simply because there isn't TPM. So such an exception is a lot more damaging than people would have.... It's not such an innocent exception at all.

    In the second point you made with respect to teachers, I think Paul commented about the fact that teachers get their remuneration from their salary. Most of the rights holders we represent try to make a living from their work, so the protection of their copyright is obviously quite different.

    Teachers get their salaries and get their promotions based on how many publications they get. And when you publish you have to waive your copyright. So because of the way the structure is set up in universities, they are not perhaps as interested in protecting their copyright. But I should mention that there is a movement of teachers going against that who want to reassert their copyright in their works.

    Thank you.

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    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard): Mr. Weiner.

    Mr. Harvey Weiner: I have a brief comment on the first point and the question we always raise in response to that. Why could not a copyright owner simply frame the uses in putting something on the Internet that he would see as being publicly and freely available and make the qualification for payment where payment is required? It would seem to me that this is not a major difficulty.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard): Now we'll go to Mr. Bonwick.

    Mr. Paul Bonwick (Simcoe—Grey, Lib.): Before I begin my questioning, Mr. Weiner just put a question to you. Can you respond to it? He said “The question is, and it seems to me...”, so I ask you to respond.

    Ms. Roanie Levy:

    As I mentioned when I gave examples of some of the rights holders who have websites, the act of putting protection, layering protection, on a website will restrict access. If you just want to look in fact at the business models that have evolved, e-commerce business models, it's all based on eyeballs. This is how they're generating revenues. It's all based on eyeballs. You want as many people to get to it as possible. So often the TPMs and the passwords will restrict eyeballs. That's the first point. The second point is that there are different levels of technologies. You could put up some TPMs very easily, perhaps at not a very high cost, that will not be very effective.

    The other thing is if you put up the TPM, how then is the user at the other end to know whether the TPM has been tampered with or removed? How then are they to know that this website is accessible and is meant to be accessible this way?

    If you start requiring people to put TPM in a password, you're doing the exact opposite of what you're trying to do, which is encourage access. So you're actually asking people to lock away their works to promote access. It simply does not make sense.

    Mr. Weiner referred to the fact that if things are free, then they shouldn't have to pay for it, and I completely agree with that. They shouldn't have to pay for it. We could deal with this very easily. The issue of payment, of setting a tariff, can easily be dealt with in the context of a collective licence where we would zero rate those sites that are truly meant to be for free, irrespective of the use. And there are ways to do this.

    We do this in the paper world and we could do it in the digital world. Let's say, for example, we survey a school and look at the sites that are accessed in a school for a certain period of time. And the time that we will choose will need to be statistically correct. Then with the sites information we get back, we will analyse the copyright notices. We'll try to determine intent. If intent is difficult to determine, we will contact the rights owners to determine intent and then we will zero rate what should not be paid.

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    Mr. Paul Bonwick: We have time for a couple more questions. The first thing I would do is begin by addressing the motion that came forward out of this committee last week on the potential ratification of WIPO.

    I'm not sure what your definition of “rush” is, but certainly in my world, and in most people's world, six years and climbing, with potential for another two or three, is not a rush. I would suggest that with a fully engaged legal team at our disposal, by way of Heritage, Industry, and directly through Justice, and after six years and change, providing well over three months to bring forward draft legislation so that this committee can get on with the business of dealing with the ratification I think is not--and this is more of a statement--simply rushing things along but rather finally recognizing how inactive we have been, how insensitive we have been with regard to the ratification. I don't necessarily think we have to gauge ourselves against the U.S. or Japan as models, but I think, with all due respect, when we become signatories to something, we should as parliamentarians expect ratification in a shorter timeframe than eight years.

    I do have a question with regard to the costs of this copyright, and perhaps Mr. Weiner or Mr. Jones could answer this. What are the cost implications per student based on this so-called access model? What is the cost impact--because clearly that's your deterrent, that is the cause for concern--is how this is going to impact the bottom line for centres of education, I would assume? Either one of you might respond, if you could.

    Mr. Paul Jones: I'll address one thing and it is that cost is not necessarily the bottom line. There's a perspective from the university community that the Internet was developed at public expense initially as a way to facilitate communication between scholars, not with commercial intent. And it's been an enormously useful tool for that purpose, really expanding people's ability to communicate, to share information, to share data, not for reasons of commercial gain but for reasons of increasing the pool of human knowledge.

    It's offensive to be told that we are going to have to pay money to continue to do that through some sort of collective licensing scheme. When we talk about a zero rate for free material, it is not a zero rate for free material. You sign up to use the Internet and we're going to pretend not to charge you for a certain portion of it. But the fact is, at the end of the day it's paying money for stuff--

    Mr. Paul Bonwick: Can you give me dollars and cents, though? You must have done a cost analysis to say it's going to cost us a billion, it's going to cost us a million, or it's going to cost us something in between.

    Mr. Paul Jones: No, I haven't. For us it's not a cost issue.

    Mr. Paul Bonwick: So if it's not a cost issue, then why are we talking about free versus chargeable materials?

    Mr. Paul Jones: It's not a cost issue in the sense that there's a particular dollar figure I am concerned about; it's the principle to have to pay to use something that we invented for our own purposes.

    Mr. Paul Bonwick: The principle I'm working on is that the education system in this country tries to instill a sense of confidence in students to become creators. We try to promote this; we try to encourage people to become creators. So I see a fairly significant contradiction when we tell these people to become creators, when we tell these people that there will be some sort of livelihood generated by becoming creators, and then to say it's the principle of the thing that we don't think you should be getting paid. That's where I'm going with it. If you don't have dollars and cents, I have a challenge with why there's a problem.

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    Mr. Paul Jones: Probably to his everlasting regret, the executive director of CANCOPY, when speculating about what percentage of content on the Internet is free, came up with, I think, the figure of 90% or 95%. So there's a vast amount of material out there that people create to share not for profit. Not everyone is motivated by a desire for money. There's a desire to share information, and that's the really important principle that we're standing behind.

    Mr. Harvey Weiner: Let me elaborate on that particular point, because I think we're coming at it from perhaps differing premises. We have never denied, and support in fact, the right for creators to be remunerated for the work they want to be remunerated for. Certainly that is a lesson our students would be picking up as well. But we also recognize, as does the economy of the Copyright Act, certainly as originally drafted, that there is a public interest here, and while the Internet requires an extension of copyright law, being a new form of technology, it is also an avenue to encourage and facilitate public discourse.

    There are a certain number of materials, difficult to define, I agree, and not tied to the two costs, that are in the public interest, are freely accessible, and should not be subject in principle to a negotiation. I don't want to negotiate for something that is free. I don't think a collective has a mandate to negotiate for something that is intended to be free. It seems to me this is a principle that has to be dealt with in balanced legislation by the government in a copyright act, and I think that's very critical.

    On the other point, since I have the floor, maybe I'm somewhat jaded in terms of the timeframe for WIPO or whatever, but I go back in terms of copyright legislation to Flora MacDonald. So six years is a relatively short span when we talk about copyright legislation.

    So when I look at the fact that two countries, Japan and the U.S.--

    Mr. Paul Bonwick: And 48 others

    Mr. Harvey Weiner: If we're behind, then there are a hell of a lot of other countries that are behind, and I would suggest they are probably reflecting as well and dealing with the complexities in trying to look at all the avenues within the context of their own country, as we believe we should be doing as well.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard): Ms. Lill.

    Ms. Wendy Lill (Dartmouth, NDP): I find it all pretty amazing to hear language about how the Internet was developed at public expense with no commercial intent. It all just sounds like it was all for the grand expansion of human knowledge. I actually don't buy that at all.

    My understanding was that it was for military purposes and that it was not for the expansion of public knowledge at all. And to say, let's increase the pool of human knowledge...there are billions and billions of dollars being made on this thing called the Internet. So it is counterintuitive to hear you two talk like this about the fact that it's all about the public good, because I don't believe it, and you'd have to really show me how that--

    Mr. Harvey Weiner: But with respect, I think you have distorted and exaggerated the points we've made. No one has argued, neither Paul nor I, that the Internet does not have a very distinct and important commercial purpose, but it also has a public aspect to it, and that aspect has to be dealt with in public policy. It is not strictly a commercial venture. It should not be, and that's what it's becoming.

    Ms. Wendy Lill: With all due respect, I did hear a lot of that very warm, fuzzy language about the Internet being the centre of dissemination of information for the public good. I will simply say that's something that I did hear. So that's a problem.

    I really don't want to think that authors and educational institutions and public libraries are at odds, but they clearly are, and we have a big problem with that. I don't know. I hear about things like teachable moments--and I understand that teachers do need to grab the moment and be able to work with the materials they have, and if they have computers and want to get online, I understand that. But in former days, when they had teachable moments, what did they have? They had textbooks, which I imagine they paid for. They went to the bookstore to get them and they paid for them. Am I wrong? What's this teachable moment thing?

    A voice: Is that a rhetorical question?

    Ms. Wendy Lill: No, it's not, actually. Maybe you could tell me what you meant by that. What does the concept “teachable moment” have to do with—

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    Mr. Harvey Weiner: What I would suggest to you is that a phenomenon we're finding in our elementary and secondary schools is called the “chill effect”. That is the kinds of warnings that have been provided both by school boards and by teacher federations, such as our own, to be very careful to ensure that whatever you are accessing is in fact accessible either through a licence that provides for it or through some sort of authorization you have received. This is having a chilling effect in terms of the use of various materials, and I don't know that that is an intent we would want to foster, nor do I believe the creators would want to foster that. That is the point I'm trying to make: very often there is material that could be useful and is not being used because there is a lack of clarity and a lack of ability to get the clarity that is required in order to use such material.

    Ms. Wendy Lill: Okay. I would like to go over to this side of the table and ask--

    Mr. Paul Jones: May I respond to one thing? You talk about things being counterintuitive. It's somewhat counterintuitive for me to hear, coming from the NDP, a position in favour of the complete commercial expropriation of the Internet. That's shocking. There's a huge space on there that is used by the public to exchange stuff not for profit. Most of the stuff on the Internet, according to Access Copyright, is there not for profit.

    Ms. Wendy Lill: I'd like to go to this side of the table and ask you about the chill effect. I'd like you to answer their concerns about this chill effect, because we don't want that. Obviously, you want to have information out and used.

    Ms. Roanie Levy: Absolutely, and thank you for the opportunity to answer to that.

    A collective licence would remove completely any chill effect that they feel is there--completely. The teacher, a grade six student, a grade two student, a university student, anybody, will be able to go online with the certainty that they're not infringing copyright, that they have a collective licence. That should not be a problem.

    Ms. Jacqueline Hushion: For a second I'd like to tell you about something that we commissioned. It's called the Campbell report. It was done by Catherine Campbell. We commissioned it for this joint working group of the heritage and industry departments. We did it because “freely available” and “freely accessible” are not the same as “accessible for free” or “available for free”. We couldn't come to an agreement in this working group as to those definitions.

    It became very clear that we knew not nearly enough about the intent of people who put information on the Internet, so our organization commissioned Catherine to do some research and produce a report. Catherine has said she'll permit this so we are happy to give all of you copies of that. Everyone on the committee had it; both departments have it.

    I think the information will help the members of the committee see that the issue isn't that we are at loggerheads with the educators or that we're in conflict. It's that there is an area in the middle, which is an area of definitions and intent and degree, and that's where we've been unable to come to terms with each other. It doesn't mean that we don't want educators and students to have access; it's a matter of how.

    I will forward those to Rémi Bourgault.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard): We're going to go to Mr. Shepherd.

    Mr. Alex Shepherd (Durham, Lib.): Thanks for having an interesting discussion today.

    When you talk about the intent of people who put their information on the Internet... Forget about what's going to happen down the road, which is presumably what we're talking about, as to how to evolve some kind of copyright legislation. Today, if you put your information on the Internet, aren't you essentially putting it in a public domain?

    Ms. Roanie Levy: No, actually when you put your information on the Internet you're allowing people to browse through it and to print it for personal use.

    Now, often when you put stuff on the Internet you will put a copyright notice describing your intent. Copyright notice is legal, and it gets complicated and sometimes it's difficult to interpret.

    What the educators are suggesting is that we ignore the copyright notice, irrespective of the intent that is written out on the Internet. If there isn't a type of protection measure, you should go ahead and it should be copied freely.

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    Mr. Alex Shepherd: If you, as a creator or a person who represents creators, seriously wanted to restrict access, then why would you (a) put it on the Internet or (b) if you did, why don't you specifically ask people to pay for access to further information? That way it would clarify.... Why are you leaving it up to government to make these definitions for you?

    Ms. Roanie Levy: In fact, we're not leaving it up to government. Often the site itself will have a copyright notice on it, and it will have a page describing what is permitted with the work that has been up.

    The point of putting things up and having people pay for licences is not to restrict access to them. People want others to browse and print their work for personal uses, but they don't want their work to get reprinted somewhere else; to be used in a different context; to be used in the education sector, which is a market.

    Mr. Alex Shepherd: Yes, but clearly they can't control it once they've put it on the Internet. They might have great intentions, but you'd be pretty naive to think that people couldn't do that.

    Ms. Roanie Levy: You're right that they may not be able to control what happens in people's individual computers, but the Copyright Act, as it stands today, allows them to control that because it allows them to set terms and conditions of how they want their works to be used. Of course, a lot of it depends on the good faith of people, that they will not use it in a way that it is not permitted and not allowed. That would be outlined in the copyright notice on the website.

    Mr. Alex Shepherd: But you want the legislation to unfold in such a way that you will be able to say, “Okay, the University of Toronto accessed this site 1,500 times this month; therefore, the University of Toronto owes us x number of dollars”.

    Ms. Roanie Levy: The legislation already allows me to do that. It's just that the framework is there in such a way that it's not the efficient way I would do it. The legislation is such that a person is entitled to get payment for the use of their works, so it's not a concept that would be new to the Copyright Act.

    Mr. Alex Shepherd: Okay, educate me. Is the University of Toronto currently paying you a collective right for accessing the information of your clients?

    Ms. Roanie Levy: Yes. The University of Toronto is paying Access Copyright under a comprehensive licence to make photocopies of work. It's the same concept that we're talking about in digital as in paper work.

    Mr. Alex Shepherd: No, no, no. I thought we were talking about the Internet.

    Ms. Roanie Levy: The University of Toronto is also paying us on a transactional basis when they want to use digital copies of works. So, yes, we do get calls from the University of Toronto and other universities across the country when they want to use things digitally. We get calls from them when they want to use things over a website; they call us and ask us to clear their rights.

    At this point, we do it on a transactional basis only. It's not very efficient; it's very time-consuming. It's obviously very costly to do it this way. We're not in a position to do it on a comprehensive basis, which would facilitate everybody's life and allow the learning moment to occur.

    Yes, it is happening.

    Mr. Paul Jones: I think the problem here is that the corporate commercial sector wants to have its cake and eat it too, with respect to the Internet.

    It's a wonderful tool for distributing information very rapidly to all kinds of different people. When commercial interests see this, they say, “This is amazing. This is great. We can get all kinds of eyeballs. We can make money off this.” But the problem then kicks in that the same benefit that allows people to flip things back and forth so quickly also becomes a detriment to charging money for things.

    So there's a desire to maintain the Internet as a thing they can zip stuff around, but then a desire to start to put up walls, or to start to charge for everything on it. That's what is happening, in our view, with the desire to have a collective licence to use the Internet.

    Mr. Alex Shepherd: The creeping commercialization of the Internet is your point.

    I want to perhaps go off on another tangent. One thing that we do discuss here is the extension of rights from 50 years to 70 years, and you brought it up. I'm interested in hearing, perhaps from all of you, about who exactly we are protecting there.

    I know the artist, presumably the person who prepared the work, the creator, during their lifetime clearly would like to receive some cashflow from that. Now we're talking about 50 years after they die. Presumably during their lifetime they could have sold their works, and they had a 50-year hiatus after their life, so anybody who bought them would know that they've had some longevity. By going out another 20 years, who benefits from that? Does the creator really benefit, or are we really benefiting some secondary people who bought the work and who are trying to make some bucks off it?

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    Mr. Paul Jones: I think in part you're benefiting potential heirs down the line. You're adding an extra 20 years for them. Is that in the creator's mind when they're producing something? It's not the case when I produce something. I'm not thinking about what my children's children are going to derive monetarily for it. That's a portion of who you have to consider when you're talking about creators. There are also owners, and owners are not necessarily creators.

    I don't know if it's an urban legend or not or if it's based in truth, but the extension of copyright in the United States is referred to as the Mickey Mouse amendment, because Mickey was going to fall into the public domain and Disney was worried, so they extended it 20 years. So it's not a matter of some impoverished widows and orphans making money; it's a huge multi-billion-dollar, multinational corporation that has lobbied extensively to have this changed.

    The flip side of it is there's money going to different people, but for us there's also the issue of the public domain, which for our members and I think for all of Canadian society is enormously important. It's material that is now available for people to use, to change, to alter, to develop from. And when you start extending the term, you start to diminish the public domain. You move away from a world where not everything is private property into a world where everything becomes private property. I think that's a big concern for our members, and it would be a big loss for all of Canada. It gets back to the issue of balancing.

    Ms. Jacqueline Hushion: I don't disagree, but even though it was the Mickey Mouse amendment, we still are now faced with this reality. The two trading partners for Canada with whom publishers and creators do the most business are the United Kingdom and the United States. The European Community is moving to 70 years and the United States is at 70 years. So if we want reciprocity and if we want to be consistent with our major trading partners, then we too need to be at 70 years.

    I'm on the International Publishers Copyright Council and I just came back from its annual meeting in Mexico two weeks ago. They went to 100 years, which I can't believe. No one could believe it; no one on the Copyright Council could believe it or even support it. Not even the Mexican representatives could support it.

    The last point I want to make is that people from the education sector have said it is offensive to have to pay for certain kinds of material on the Internet. I bring us back to the word I used early on, which was the word “channel”. Copyright is copyright is copyright. This is a channel. It is a medium. That's all it is. It's the same as covers that bind a book. If this document is in copyright in this form, this document is in copyright on the Internet. So offensive or not, the fact is, it's just a way of moving information around. It doesn't change the value or the nature of the copyright material, or the fact that it needs to be compensated for.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard): There is a comment from Ms. Levy, and then we'll go to the next round.

    Mr. Paul Jones: I want to say I agree entirely with that. A lot of stuff is up there not intending to be compensated for.

    Ms. Roanie Levy: The EU went to 70 years, and as far as I understand, it had nothing to do with the Mickey Mouse amendment. The reasoning behind the 70 years in fact has to do with the years. When someone builds a business, a manufacturing plant, they hope their children will be able to benefit from it. Life expectancy has increased, and that is part of the reasoning behind going from 50 to 70 years.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard): Okay. On the second round, I understand Ms. Lill wants a question, and then I think Mr. Bonwick wants one as well.

    Can I ask you one short question, Ms. Levy? Give me a little thumbnail sketch of your collective, of the people you represent. Are they all rich millionaires?

    Ms. Roanie Levy: No, absolutely not. We represent 5,500 creators. That includes authors, photographers, illustrators, most of whom cannot make a living from their art and have to subsidize it elsewhere. We represent 540 book, magazine, and newspaper articles. Some are big, but most are small and are struggling. So, no, they are not all rich; most of them are not.

    This month we will be issuing a repertoire payment to all of our creators. It's actually a fairly nice repertoire payment. This is based on the royalties we get in for the copying of their works. Creators will get $640 for the year. You will not believe how excited they are about getting this cheque.

º  (1655)  

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard): That's $640.

    Ms. Roanie Levy: Yes, $640, and this is for the copying of their work. They are really excited. They hear that this is going to come in this month and we get calls non-stop for the cheque. So it does make a difference.

    Ms. Jacqueline Hushion: That's on top of all their other royalties. Their repertoire payment is a separate payment. It's a bonus.

    Ms. Roanie Levy: So they're not all big and rich. There are a lot of small ones. The royalties they get from us do make a difference.

    Mr. Paul Jones: Ms. Levy represents some of our members too.

    Ms. Catherine Campbell: And mine too.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard): It's just one happy family, isn't it?

    Voices: Oh, oh!

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard): Wendy.

    Ms. Wendy Lill: You mentioned that Canada is not doing a good job of protecting its databases and that other countries don't trust us to protect their databases. I don't know what you're talking about. What databases are we talking about? Give me some examples. What are these things that are underprotected, and what does it mean to me?

    Ms. Catherine Campbell: It's a huge variety of databases, everything from collections of copyrightable materials to collections of materials. Each element of those databases would in fact perhaps be in the public domain.

    Quite often, the investment in these databases is the skill involved in analysis and judgment when doing the collection of the materials. There's a lot of labour, and there is quite often a huge investment of time to get a critical mass in place in order to service some aspect of the industry. It can be educational. There are certainly enormous numbers of legal information databases.

    Databases, of course, exist in all media as well. It has become a much bigger issue as we have now widened access to the data using the Internet environment. Lots of news media use databases to give access to their sources—financial, for example. There is a range from smaller participants to very large media groups like Thompson, which is obviously a Canadian company of some significance.

    In Canada, the legal opinions that have been generated over the last few years to respond both to government requests for an opinion in that regard and to association requests have been inconsistent in their evaluation of whether or not databases fall within the definition of “protectable material” in the Copyright Act. One of the terms that has caused the most inconsistency in its interpretation is the whole question of the level of creativity that is required to give those databases protection under the Copyright Act.

    Several cases have gone down. They're referenced in the submission that was made in the middle of September. I don't know that I need to just recite the names. There's one going before the Supreme Court of Canada in November in respect of legal material—not affecting legal online material, but touching the creativity of collections of material and whether it's protected by the Copyright Act.

    In Europe, the way this has been handled is not under copyright but under the principle of sui generis. It gives the collections of databases protection for 15 years.

    In the States, there's a mix of protections. Some of it is under a misappropriation approach. The problem with the misappropriation approach is that there are very few interim ways of handling infringements—the taking of those materials or harvesting of databases. They also have a different definition of “creativity”, which is causing a tremendous number of issues to end up in the courts.

    In their points of view on this, the international associations don't see sui generis and don't see the American solution...and they look at a legal environment or a legal history that has been downright inconsistent. The investors in this environment look at the same thing and ask, “Am I going to invest in doing this work—in years, in labour, and in creativity—when I can't guarantee there's going to be recognition that it's entitled to protection?”

»  (1700)  

    Ms. Jacqueline Hushion: We can give you one specific example. There was a brilliant Canadian database, and I say “was” deliberately. A young man in Montreal put together what was considered to be the world's foremost database on an artist. Even the Dutch and the Belgian museums that maintain this artist's works said it was the best database they had ever seen.

    Someone in Belgium harvested that full database from the Internet. They just took it, lifted it, and gave it a new URL, and it became a Belgian database site. When the Canadian went to the Belgians and said, “You have to do something about this”, they said, “Why? You wouldn't do anything for us under equivalent circumstances, so get in line and wait.”

    He's still waiting. His life's work and all of his investment are gone, and so far there's been no compensation from Belgium and no sense of the justice system in Belgium being in any hurry to deal with this, because they don't see that we extend reciprocity should the same thing happen to a Belgian in Canada.

    Mr. Paul Jones: There are some other issues about databases. I'm glad you brought up the subject, because there are really big public policy considerations.

    One of the concerns of the scientific community is that facts are going to be locked up and locked away and only made available for a cost. There's an issue of facts moving from something that cannot be protected through intellectual property law into something that can be protected, that can be locked up. The concern is that as public expenditures are cut back a lot of the work that has traditionally been done by governments is now falling into the private sector.

    An example of this is satellite imagery. The National Academy of Sciences has done an important study on this in the United States. The issue is the Landsat satellites, which take satellite pictures of various portions of the earth. This is very important to use for issues of deforestation or global warming, and things like that. The government money was cut back; the service was privatized—it went to the private sector where the profit motive became the be-all and end-all—and the price of the images went up from $3 or $4 per image to several thousand dollars per image. What happened was there was a transfer of knowledge away from public accessibility towards being locked up.

    The database industry is rightly concerned about a return on its investment. Perhaps there is a justification for locking this material up through a sui generis regime. Perhaps there's a concern that copyright can't deal with some of this stuff. But it's not simply a matter of corporate profit at the end of the day. There's a bigger issue here; there's access by scientists in third world countries to data; there's access to science in Canadian universities, which have suffered a lot of funding cutbacks. The concern is that if a sui generis regime is set up that locks down data, prices will go through the roof, and the public good will suffer.

    Ms. Wendy Lill: Let's go to the example that was just given about this person who has collected his life's work. What do you think about that? Does it concern you that he has lost that ownership? You're thinking that what we're seeing is the commercialization of all things, but what about this person? Is this a commercialization issue we're looking at, in terms of him and his ownership of that knowledge base, in your estimation?

    Mr. Paul Jones: I'm not sure. I'm not familiar with all the facts of that case. We've heard a compelling story, but there may be another side to it. It seems to me the Belgians are at fault here. My understanding is that there is reciprocity for copyright protection and that this should be protected in Belgium the same way it is in Canada. I think also it's not just Canada. The States have not incorporated this kind of sui generis regime. The database industry there hasn't collapsed. Again, I would caution, why rush forward with something?

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    Ms. Jacqueline Hushion: There is currently a bill in Congress related to database protection. There may be a second one in the other chamber soon.

    In this case, it was the life's work of the database builder, and he invested a lot of money. The way he received money from that database was that he had advertisers on the database site. He no longer receives the benefit of the payment from those who advertise using banners or wraparounds on his database, because there's no longer any database to draw attention or, as Roanie mentioned, eyeballs. There's no longer a Canadian database on Vermeer to draw attention to.

    Ms. Catherine Campbell: To clarify, I don't think our preference would be sui generis. Our preference would be an adequate legislative amendment to the Copyright Act that brings it within the purview of the Copyright Act, with all of the access that exists there, with protections for fair dealing, etc., that may not be concepts that comfortably align themselves with sui generis. So the preference would be to clearly bring this within the protection of the Copyright Act.

    Mr. Paul Jones: There may be some room for agreement between our organizations on that. It's sui generis that we're really concerned about.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard): Thank you.

    Paul, did you want to...

    Mr. Paul Bonwick: Thank you.

    Where to start? I have to clear up some misconceptions that I've picked up over the course of the afternoon.

    First of all, thank you to both of you. I didn't say that at the start.

    As a person just learning, it's interesting to hear clearly, in some cases, very polarized views on a particular issue, but I would suggest that both groups have a very similar motivation, which is that you want to make sure people have the ability to experience what we're creating. The question really becomes, contrary to perhaps Mr. Jones'...the issue is really surrounding the money, whether it's free, whether it was intended to be free, or whether you have the right or we have the right to charge for some of this stuff. So I'd like to move in that direction in a couple of specific areas.

    One is the finances of it, the cost of it, whether it be for our school system, our education, academia, or whether it be for third world or developing nations. My first question is, are the costs so onerous that the education system would not be able to bear them, that centres of education in developing nations would not be able to bear those costs?

    I would also like to move into the area and have you address the questions, after I'm done, with regard to the so-called red tape. Based on Mr. Weiner's comments, I would suggest that the perception the committee could take is that if we do this, there could be an exorbitant amount of red tape. Missing out on this new phrase I've learned today, “the learning moment”, is there something that would require hours or days or weeks to capture that which is needed to facilitate that epiphany, that unique moment in the day when somebody is open to learning? What is the red tape?

    The last question is, what is the specific cost? Can anybody give me that, the specific cost, roughly? I realize there would be a negotiation of some kind, but ballpark me. Give me $1 billion, give me per student, is it $1 per student, is it $100 per student? Ballpark me so I have some appreciation.

    There are three things for you to take on.

    Ms. Roanie Levy: I'll start with the last one, the specific cost. Maybe it will also address the first one at the same time.

    As you pointed out, it would be a negotiation, and some of the people we'd be negotiating with are at this table, so I can't exactly give you a specific cost. However, I will ballpark you.

    If you look at our paper licence--and you could imagine that it would be something similar to our paper licence--the cost per student for a full year of access to a world of printed material at the elementary level is $2.20 per student for the entire year. The cost at the post-secondary level, again for access to the world of printed material, is $3 per student per year.

    If you want to put that into context, for a post-secondary student, $3 is the price of a couple of coffees at Second Cup--not cappuccinos either. For the elementary school student, if you have a school of, say, 1,000 students, you're talking about $2,200 for the whole school to be covered.

    I don't have the exact budgets for schools, but I would venture that this is significantly less than they spend on lawn maintenance. So it's really not a lot to open the door to a world of literature and of printed works.

»  (1710)  

    Mr. Paul Bonwick: Red tape.

    Ms. Roanie Levy: Right now in the paper world you would think the red tape would be quite similar to what we would find in the digital world. We essentially negotiate the licence; the licence is negotiated and that's it. Students walk into the library, they want to copy a work, they go to the photocopier, and they photocopy work. That's it, that's all. There is no red tape. Once the licence is there, it's a comprehensive licence. You do not need to clear the rights individually any more; you just go ahead and use it. That's it.

    Mr. Paul Bonwick: I would like Mr. Weiner and Mr. Jones to help me out with “free”, because I think we're all trying to accomplish the same thing; it's just a case of what that balance is going to be. There are those individuals, both in the structured education system as well as individuals, perhaps like ourselves, who may produce materials that we want to go out into the public domain. We expect them to be free, if I can use that word.

    I think where I'm having a challenge is qualifying what the public domain is and the intention of free. I'm saying if I were to write my memoirs about the silliness I've seen up here some days--not today, though--after a seven-year political career, I would like Canadians to be able to access that. I would not appreciate, five years from now, finding out that excerpts from my memoirs have gone into a political writer's book that made that person $100,000.

    I don't want Susan Delacourt launching her book this afternoon. If somebody had done their memoirs five years ago and she took a massive amount of quantity out of that memoir, I think it should be up to that person to determine if that's what they meant by free. Did they want that person to include that in their publication so they could make a lot of money? Help me out with this word “free”.

    Mr. Paul Jones: I'll suggest there's a choice people have to make. The education community has drawn a bright line that is basically technological protection measures. If you put stuff on the Internet that's not protected, regardless of motive, people will come and take it. What we're saying is we want some clarity of intention that it's there for free. The bright line we have suggested it is, is that it's not protected or it's not declared; that's something the creator-owner doesn't want to take, and that's the bright line we've suggested.

    Mr. Paul Bonwick: The last point I wanted to clear up was a statement made with regard to.... I think Mr. Jones used Walt Disney as an example. This is not about creators; this is about multi-billion-dollar corporations. I'm working under the premise that one of the major factors is about the creators, so I'm asking Access, I guess, is the majority of your membership multi-billion-dollar corporations? Give us some background. Are you here representing AOL, or are you here representing Time Warner? Who are you representing?

    Ms. Roanie Levy: In pure numbers, the majority of our affiliates are creators, authors, illustrators, photographers--5,500 and growing in Canada. Then we have publishers--books, magazines, and newspapers. There are some, a handful, that are multinational,. All of the remaining are small Canadian publishers. That's who we're representing.

»  (1715)  

    Mr. Harvey Weiner: If I may, I want to come back to your first point briefly. I still think we're missing a basic philosophical principle that we outlined--both of us, Paul and I--in our initial presentation. That is that one has to go back to the premises that underlie the Copyright Act.

    I don't believe--and it seems to me that a number of members of the committee are operating from the premise--that copyright legislation is there strictly for the benefit of the creators. If we are talking about public domain, if we're talking about public interest, then the solution--and I have to come back to that--of a licence to cover every aspect of copyright material is not a solution; it's a perversion and a distortion of the intent of the act. It's a distortion of the Supreme Court decision that was rendered in the case I referred to.

    It seems to me that with all the difficulties that are involved--and we've tried to address them--in defining what is free and publicly accessible, with no intent on the part of the creator to get compensation, we have to do that. The appropriate mechanism is not in negotiating the fact that air is free, so we're going to give you an allowance because you're breathing the air and we agree that it's free.

    Mr. Paul Jones: There was another really excellent point you brought up that I want to just touch on briefly, and that's the distinction between corporate owners of copyright material and the individual creators of copyright material.

    In the United States, the writers' union there is making interesting alliances with the user community, for example, with the library community. They are identifying a common set of interests between individual creators and users, in opposition to the big corporate publishers. I think there's some sign of that starting to happen in Canada as well.

    I know, as a creator-member of Access Copyright, that there are concerns in the creator community about how that organization is working.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard): Thank you.

    Ms. Allard, and then Mr. Shepherd, and then maybe that will be it.

[Translation]

    Ms. Carole-Marie Allard (Laval East, Lib.): Good day. I'm sorry I had to step out for a moment. My presence was required for an important vote in the Official Languages Committee. I apologize for my absence.

    I don't know whether you discussed this during my absence, but from what Ms. Levy was saying, I get the impression that in your opinion, licensing agencies work very well at the present time. You'd like to strengthen your hold on the Internet. You mentioned, as Ms. Hushion also did, collective licensing. I also understood you to say that you would like the legislation to include a presumption, to avoid the possibility of legal action being taken. Basically, this would be similar to the Rand formula. All authors would be represented by licensing agencies, a presumption would exist that all actions are taken in good faith and if something does happen, the person invoking copyright would in fact have to demonstrate...

    Have I understood your position correctly?

    Ms. Roanie Levy: Not exactly. To reiterate our request, I would have to say that licensing agencies are very effective in the case of print material. Things get more complicated when we're dealing with the digital world, particularly in terms of our responsibility. The issue is complicated by the fact that an electronic reproduction is a perfect, inexpensive copy that can be distributed immediately throughout the world. Therefore, our responsibility is much broader.

    We're recommending a system where once a certain number of rights have been recognized, the presumption is that all other works in the same category are covered as well.

    Ms. Carole-Marie Allard: You mean once you have achieved a critical mass of authors.

    Ms. Roanie Levy: That's right.

    Ms. Carole-Marie Allard: I understand.

    Ms. Roanie Levy: Licensing provisions would be extended. In so doing, licences that provide comprehensive coverage would be issued, thereby enabling users to access many more works at a lower cost. As well, our level of responsibility is lesser. This is not to say that we would have no responsibility whatsoever. The Copyright Board's role is precisely to ensure that everything is done in a responsible manner.

»  (1720)  

    Ms. Carole-Marie Allard: Ms. Hushion, Mr. Bonwick is a little concerned about seeing his works reproduced and seeing someone else profit from his published material. However, even today, I believe a journalist can quote an excerpt from my book—that happens—provided a reference is given. We agree on that point.

    Getting back to your submission, you express support for collective licensing, but argue that publishers must continue to administer the copyright licensing agency. Is that correct?

    As an author, I must disagree with your position. Once a publisher has published our work, that's pretty much the end of the relationship. After ten years have passed since a work's publication, I would prefer to have a collective licensing agency dealing with copyright issues rather than have to go through my publisher.

    Where do you stand on this issue?

[English]

    Ms. Jacqueline Hushion: That's a fair point, and I didn't necessarily mean the publisher to the exclusion of the writer or the publisher specifically. Perhaps I should have said the “rights holder”. For example, when Access Copyright negotiates the collective licence with the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada for every student in the country, there are representatives of rights holders at the table to ensure that what Access Copyright puts in that licence remains in the interest of creators and producers.

    There's a lot of support between us and Access Copyright, but there are also normal and natural tensions, because they are a third party representing your rights-holder interests. It's just a matter of checks and balances.

    Ms. Carole-Marie Allard: But the creator is the writer. It's not the editor.

    Ms. Jacqueline Hushion: That's absolutely correct, but often the writer vests, for the purposes of those kinds of negotiations, his interest in the negotiations with his or her publisher, and the money that Access Copyright gives to the publisher is split with the creator based on the contract between that publisher and that creator. So they track the contract of the publisher.

    Ms. Carole-Marie Allard: When we sign an agreement to publish a book, I can tell you that a writer doesn't have a lot of choices.

    Ms. Jacqueline Hushion: I can't comment on that, but I can tell you that if you have an agreement with a publisher that says your subsidiary-right percentage is 25% or 100%, when that cheque comes from Access Copyright to your publisher, if your contract says 25%, the publisher gives you 25%; if it's 100%, you get 100%.

    Ms. Carole-Marie Allard: But would you agree that after a certain period...let's say I published in 1990--thirteen years ago now--and I haven't heard from my publisher for nine years. Would you be ready to recognize that after a certain number of years collective licensing should not get involved with publishers?

    Ms. Jacqueline Hushion: I think what you're getting at is letting the copyright revert to the author, and a lot of publishers do that. That's effectively what happens when they decide not to publish a new edition or whatever. All of the rights revert to the author, in which case the author then negotiates for himself or herself.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard): We have only a couple of minutes left.

    Mr. Shepherd.

    Mr. Alex Shepherd: I'll try to be quick.

    It seems to me what we're really arguing about is the power of the Internet, and the problem is if you're the creator, you want to get access to that to promote yourself. Many members of Parliament, for instance, have websites. I write a column every week. I would like to think people are taking my stuff. So we're trying to promote, and I'm sure some of your people are trying to do the same thing. The theory is, if you don't want to be copied, you stay off the thing, but the advice would be that you're pretty dumb if you do that, because nobody's going to hear of you.

    So that's really the problem, isn't it? And these people are saying, where do you draw that line? You want to access it and you want to promote yourself, but by promoting yourself you're putting out a certain amount of stuff for free. You want to say, well, now that you have some of the free stuff, we draw these....

    I was just interested in some of the things you said as a throw-off. You said you were sending out this cheque for $604 or whatever. Does everybody get paid the same?

»  (1725)  

    Ms. Roanie Levy: It depends. The royalties distribution is set by our board. Our board is made up of 19 members--half of them are creators and half of them are publishers. They determine how the royalties will be distributed.

    The money that comes in from different sectors gets distributed differently because the works that are being used in different sectors are different works. For example, the post-secondary royalties will get distributed one way; the royalties that come from government will be distributed in a different way.

    Mr. Alex Shepherd: But that's based on the source of the money. What if I'm a real Margaret Atwood type and everybody wants my stuff? Do I get more money than--

    Ms. Roanie Levy: If we have evidence of your work being copied, and some of our licences require people to track the work that is being copied...or we do a sampling process, for example, in a K to 12 school to see what is being copied.... So if Margaret Atwood comes out, she would get more than the other--

    Mr. Alex Shepherd: Lastly, we talked about the extension of copyright; I believe it's beyond death or some 50 years beyond. You said people are living longer. Doesn't that argument support my argument, that if I wrote the piece when I was 45 and I lived to 95, there's 50 years, and it's actually a longer period of time of copyright if people are living longer?

    Ms. Roanie Levy: True, but your children are also living longer. That's the reason.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard): Just before you go, does anyone have a quick opinion on having two federal ministers responsible for copyright reform, or whether we should have just one, either Heritage or Industry?

    Mr. Weiner.

    Mr. Harvey Weiner: Well, as the general comment that I think I made at the outset, on the difficulty of developing what I would call a policy coherence, it would seem to me that input--I don't know whether that just happens at the cabinet table--should be required from a number of ministers.

    I personally don't have any difficulty in this shared portfolio. It seems to me that there is the commercial...and I would hope that the public interest aspect of that would be dealt with through Heritage, although I sometimes have some doubts as to how much consideration that aspect gets.

    But one would hope that this tension between the two departments or the work that has to be done between the two departments at least brings into consideration all the complexities of the issue.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard): Ms. Levy, do you have a comment?

    Ms. Roanie Levy: Yes, there are so many different perspectives on copyright that there is no doubt in my mind that the two departments have a different perspective themselves on copyright, and the fact that they are both involved only makes the process of copyright reform more complex and more time-consuming.

    If a single department were responsible for copyright reform, I think the process would be a lot less time-consuming and we would probably move on a lot quicker. So a single department would probably be a good thing.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard): Also, do you have a thought on proceeding with copyright reform incrementally, or should it be done all in one fell swoop?

    Mr. Paul Jones: Two quick points.

    On your last point, it seems kind of counterintuitive, but our sense is that Industry has been more cognizant of the broader public policy goals than Heritage. So in terms of bringing in a broader perspective, it might not be a bad thing to involve industry.

    In terms of proceeding incrementally or all at once, I guess you can go either way, but it's important that whatever step happens there has to be a kind of lock-step balancing between recognizing rights of creators and recognizing the needs of users as well.

    What we would not want to see is a whole bunch of tightening of the Copyright Act, to be followed some years down the line, or never, by new exceptions.

»  (1730)  

    Mr. Harvey Weiner: Bill C-32 is a perfect example.

    Ms. Jacqueline Hushion: I would agree with you, Harvey.

    We would like to see rolling copyright reform that allowed everyone on both sides of each consideration to have enough time to bear down on one, two, or three things at a time, in bundles or baskets. I think Bill C-32 taught all of us a lot, and there are a lot of things we don't want to repeat.

    Ms. Roanie Levy: In the ideal world, I think things would be dealt with all together, in one shot, and it would happen in six months. But given that it's not happening in six months, then I think we have no choice but to do it incrementally, and if we're going to do it incrementally, we have to ensure that the issues we are dealing with have the necessary crossovers.

    The Vice-Chair (Mr. John Harvard): I guess if we're going to do it incrementally, then we have to decide which comes first, which comes second, and which comes third, or whatever.

    Well, this has been very stimulating. Thank you. We appreciate it very much.

    The meeting is adjourned.