By Denis Carmel
OTTAWA – In another session of the pre-study of Bill C-11 today, the Senate Transport and Communications Committee heard from some of the web giants and their issues with the Online Streaming Act seemed a little clearer.
Representatives from Spotify, The Walt Disney Company and the Digital Media Association (DiMA), which represents the interests of Amazon, Apple, Google, Pandora, Spotify and YouTube, made presentations and answered questions from the senators.
Three issues were underlined: discoverability, CanCon and, in a related fashion but more subtly, IP rights.
Don’t touch my algorithms!
While DiMA president and CEO Garrett Levin recognized the act does not allow the CRTC to modify algorithms he expressed concerned about a comment made by the chair of the CRTC who mentioned if an outcome did not satisfy them, the Commission could ask for changes.
“We propose adding a subsection that would ensure that the Commission will not require changes to, or the use of the undertaking’s algorithms or source code,” he said.
Spotify has similar concerns.
The platform’s written submission to the committee cites a 2020 report – Attitudes and Opinions Toward Commercial Radio in Canada, prepared by Ipsos Public Affairs for the CRTC – that says “a substantial majority of Canadians feel that any future regulations on streaming music services should not interfere with consumers’ ability to choose the content they want.”
Spotify’s head of artist and label partnerships Nathan Wiszniak further told the committee, “Asking services to repeatedly bias recommendations against listener preferences strikes at the core trust we have built with our customers, and could create negative feedback for those songs, ultimately harming the artist.”
CanCon rules don’t apply in the digital world
On the Canadian content issue, the committee chair, Conservative Leo Housakos, raised the issue of an amendment that had been rejected in the House by the government that “no single factor should be determinative in determining what constitutes Canadian Content,” which aimed to require the CRTC to have some flexibility. All parties agreed with this.
As Spotify said: “For emergent mediums like podcasting, regulatory definitions for Canadian Content do not exist. The user-uploaded nature of many podcasts compounds the metadata challenges we anticipate with licensed music tracks.”
They added that, “with over 80 million tracks, we do not receive sufficient metadata from partners to apply the radio definition of CanCon to our music libraries. This means many songs our culture considers ‘Canadian’ across all tiers are unlikely to technically qualify.”
Don’t touch my IP rights
On the topic of IP rights and the relationship between the ownership of such rights and the definition of Canadian content, David Fares (above), vice-president, global public policy at Disney argued, “the mere fact that we own the Intellectual Property should not disqualify us, when the work is produced in Canada telling a Canadian story …” He then gave examples of productions where the producers and personnel were Canadian but did not qualify as Canadian content.
Fares mentioned that if they provide the funding and they take the risks they should benefit.
The next meeting of the committee will be held on Sept. 20 starting at 9 a.m. ET. Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, la Fédération culturelle canadienne-française, OUTtv, the Canadian Ethnocultural Media Coalition, the Black Screen Office and the Racial Equity Media Collective are all scheduled to appear.
This will be followed by a meeting on Sept. 21 starting at 6:45 p.m. ET, which will feature representatives from the Canadian Independent Music Association, Tik Tok, Association québécoise de l’industrie du disque du spectacle et de la vidéo, Youtube and Music Canada.
