Copyright reform: the Canadian cultural sector calls on the Senate to repair Bill C-11

The Cana­dian cul­tural sec­tor urges the Sen­ate to seri­ously con­sider amend­ments to mit­i­gate the destruc­tive effects of the Bill C-11 (Copy­right Mod­ern­iza­tion Act) on con­tri­bu­tions that artists, cre­ators and pro­duc­ers make to the knowl­edge economy.

Cul­tural organ­i­sa­tions across Canada pre­sented a list of amend­ments to Bill C-11 in Feb­ru­ary to Par­lia­men­tar­i­ans aimed at min­i­miz­ing the neg­a­tive impacts of the Bill. Stephen Wad­dell, ACTRA’s National Exec­u­tive Direc­tor said, on behalf of the coali­tion, “We are deeply dis­ap­pointed that none of our rec­om­men­da­tions have been taken into account by the House of Com­mons. C-11 is now head­ing to the Sen­ate where we hope Sen­a­tors will pay more atten­tion to our concerns.”

“The com­mon con­cerns we put for­ward resulted from an unprece­dented joint effort on the part of the cul­tural sec­tor to con­cretely help Par­lia­men­tar­i­ans avoid unwanted con­se­quences of the Bill,” added Greg Nordal, Pres­i­dent and CEO of Nel­son Edu­ca­tion Ltd. “While it is good for some Cana­dian cul­tural indus­tries, Bill C-11 cre­ates an extra­or­di­nary num­ber of exemp­tions which will mate­ri­ally dam­age the liveli­hood of our artists, cre­ators and pro­duc­ers. We are now turn­ing to the Sen­ate to cor­rect the most egre­gious aspects of the Bill.”

Dur­ing the copy­right reform debate of the past eigh­teen months, the sec­tor has empha­sized that sig­nif­i­cant amounts of annual rev­enue would be unfairly put at risk by an unchanged Bill C-11. Cana­dian writ­ers and pub­lish­ers are par­tic­u­larly con­cerned with the poten­tial impacts of the new, vaguely defined exemp­tion for edu­ca­tion under fair deal­ing. Canada’s cul­tural indus­tries, as well as gov­ern­ments, have invested heav­ily in recent years to make the tran­si­tion to dig­i­tal mar­kets. Accord­ing to Nordal, “By com­pro­mis­ing the via­bil­ity of the edu­ca­tional mar­ket for Cana­dian mate­ri­als, Bill C-11 threat­ens to nul­lify these efforts. Indeed, the uncer­tainty cre­ated by the bill in its cur­rent form is already hav­ing a neg­a­tive impact on the mar­ket­place. Unless it is amended in a way that addresses its cur­rent ambi­gu­i­ties, this bill will greatly reduce incen­tives for invest­ment in the cre­ation of edu­ca­tional mate­ri­als for all Cana­dian students.”

In its cur­rent form, Bill C-11 will also have an imme­di­ate impact on the music indus­try, as the long list of excep­tions could result in the dis­ap­pear­ance of var­i­ous well-established sources of rev­enue for artists, cre­ators and pro­duc­ers. For instance, radio broad­cast­ers will no longer be required to pay rights hold­ers for copies of works kept for less than 30 days, a new excep­tion will allow the repro­duc­tion of works if it is an essen­tial part of a “tech­no­log­i­cal process”, the pri­vate copy­ing regime will not be mod­ern­ized to include dig­i­tal audio recorders and con­sumers will be allowed to freely use works to cre­ate and dis­trib­ute new “user-generated con­tent” for non-commercial pur­poses. “In addi­tion to reduc­ing the exist­ing rev­enues of rights hold­ers, the pro­posed mea­sures will restrict cre­ators’ access to new mar­kets and their par­tic­i­pa­tion in the dig­i­tal econ­omy”, said ACTRA’s Stephen Waddell.

As sig­naled by the Que­bec Bar Asso­ci­a­tion last year, it is expected that the new Act will lead to years of costly lit­i­ga­tion, includ­ing legal action likely to be ini­ti­ated by inter­na­tional trad­ing part­ners whose inter­ests are equally threat­ened by some of the new exemp­tions adopted by the House of Com­mons. We in the cre­ative com­mu­nity call on Canada’s Sen­ate to improve upon Bill C-11 and truly inject the bal­ance of inter­ests that the Gov­ern­ment sig­naled as its goal when it bravely took up the crit­i­cal chal­lenge to mod­ern­ize Canada’s copy­right law for the dig­i­tal econ­omy that will sus­tain us in the 21st century.

This press release is signed by the fol­low­ing organizations:

Access Copy­right, The Cana­dian Copy­right Licens­ing Agency
Alberta Craft Coun­cil
Alliance des arts médi­a­tiques indépendants/Independent Media Arts Alliance (IMAA)
Alliance for Arts and Cul­ture (BC)
Alliance of Cana­dian Cin­ema, Tele­vi­sion and Radio Artists (ACTRA)
ARTISTI
Arts and Cul­tural Indus­tries Asso­ci­a­tion of Man­i­toba (ACI Man­i­toba)
Asso­ci­a­tion aca­di­enne des artistes professionnel.le.s du Nouveau-Brunswick (AAAPNB)
Asso­ci­a­tion of Cana­dian Pub­lish­ers (ACP)
Asso­ci­a­tion des illus­tra­teurs et illus­tra­tri­ces du Québec (Illus­tra­tion Québec)
Asso­ci­a­tion des jour­nal­istes indépen­dants du Québec (AJIQ)
Asso­ci­a­tion des pro­fes­sion­nels des arts de la scène du Québec (APASQ)
Asso­ci­a­tion des réal­isa­teurs et réal­isatri­ces du Québec (ARRQ)
Asso­ci­a­tion nationale des éditeurs de livres (ANEL)
Asso­ci­a­tion québé­coise des auteurs dra­ma­tiques (AQAD)
Atlantic Pub­lish­ers Mar­ket­ing Asso­ci­a­tion
Book Pub­lish­ers Asso­ci­a­tion of Alberta (BPAA)
Cana­dian Artists Rep­re­sen­ta­tion Copy­right Col­lec­tive Inc. (CARCC)
Cana­dian Artists’ Rep­re­sen­ta­tion / Front des artistes cana­di­ens (CARFAC)
Cana­dian Arts Pre­sen­ters Asso­ci­a­tion / Asso­ci­a­tion cana­di­enne des organ­ismes artis­tiques (CAPACOA)
Cana­dian Authors Asso­ci­a­tion (CAA)
Cana­dian Con­fer­ence of the Arts/Conférence cana­di­enne des arts (CCA)
Cana­dian Copy­right Insti­tute (CCI)
Cana­dian Crafts Fed­er­a­tion (CCF) /Fédération cana­di­enne des métiers d’art (FCMA)
Cana­dian Fed­er­a­tion of Musi­cians (CFM) / Fédéra­tion cana­di­enne des musi­ciens (FMC)
Cana­dian Edu­ca­tional Resources Coun­cil (CERC)
Cana­dian Free­lance Union, CEP 2040 (CFU)
Cana­dian League of Com­posers (CLC) La Ligue cana­di­enne des com­pos­i­teurs (LCC)
Cana­dian Music Cen­tre (CMC)
Cana­dian Music Pub­lish­ers Asso­ci­a­tion (CMPA)
Cana­dian Musi­cal Repro­duc­tion Rights Agency Ltd (CMRRA)
Cana­dian Pub­lish­ers’ Coun­cil (CPC)
Cana­dian Soci­ety of Children’s Authors, Illus­tra­tors and Per­form­ers / Société cana­di­enne des auteurs, illus­tra­teurs et artistes pour enfants (CANSCAIP)
CMRRA-SODRAC Inc. (CSI)
Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Energy and Paper­work­ers Union of Canada / Syn­di­cat cana­dien des com­mu­ni­ca­tions, de l’énergie et du papier (CEP/SCEP)
Con­férence inter­na­tionale des arts de la scène / Inter­na­tional Exchange for the Per­form­ing Arts (CINARS)
Con­seil québé­cois de la musique (CQM)
Con­seil québé­cois du théâtre (CQT)
Craft Coun­cil of British Colum­bia
Cre­ators Copy­right Coali­tion (CCC)
Cul­ture Mon­tréal
DAMI© — Droit d’auteur / Multimédia-Internet / Copy­right
Direc­tors Guild of Canada / Guilde cana­di­enne des réal­isa­teurs (DGC)
Edmon­ton Musi­cians’ Asso­ci­a­tion
Fed­er­a­tion of BC Writ­ers
Fédéra­tion cul­turelle canadienne-française (FCCF)
Front des réal­isa­teurs indépen­dants du Canada (FRIC)
Guilde des musi­ciens et musi­ci­ennes du Québec (GMMQ)
League of Cana­dian Poets (LCP)
Lit­er­ary Press Group of Canada (LPG)
Lit­er­ary Trans­la­tors’ Asso­ci­a­tion of Canada / Asso­ci­a­tion des tra­duc­teurs et tra­duc­tri­ces lit­téraires du Canada
Play­wrights Guild of Canada (PWGC)
Pro­fes­sional Writ­ers Asso­ci­a­tion of Canada (PWAC)
Que­bec Writ­ers’ Fed­er­a­tion
Regroupe­ment des artistes en arts visuels du Québec (RAAV)
Regroupe­ment des arts inter­dis­ci­plinaires du Québec (RAIQ)
Royal Cana­dian Acad­emy of Arts / Académie royale des Arts du Canada
Saskatchewan Pub­lish­ers’ Group (SPG)
Saskatchewan Writ­ers Guild (SWG)
Screen Com­posers Guild of Canada / Guilde des com­pos­i­teurs cana­di­ens de musique à l’image (SCGC)
Soci­ety of Com­posers, Authors and Music Pub­lish­ers of Canada (SOCAN)/ Société cana­di­enne des auteurs, com­pos­i­teurs et éditeurs de musique (SOCAN)
Société de développe­ment des péri­odiques cul­turels québé­cois (SODEP)
Société civile des auteurs mul­ti­mé­dia (SCAM)
Société de ges­tion de l’Union des Artistes (ARTISTI)
Société des auteurs de radio, télévi­sion et cinéma (SARTEC)
Société des auteurs et com­pos­i­teurs dra­ma­tiques (SACD)
Société du droit de repro­duc­tion des auteurs, com­pos­i­teurs et éditeurs au Canada (SODRAC)
Société pro­fes­sion­nelle des auteurs et des com­pos­i­teurs du Québec (SPACQ)
Société québé­coise de ges­tion col­lec­tive des droits de repro­duc­tion (Copibec)
Société québé­coise des auteurs dra­ma­tiques (SOQAD)
Song­writ­ers Asso­ci­a­tion of Canada (SAC)
The Writ­ers’ Guild of Alberta (WGA)
The Writ­ers’ Union of Canada (TWUC)
Union des artistes (UDA)
Union nationale des écrivaines et des écrivains québé­cois (UNEQ)