OTTAWA – Despite having more than 100 film and television credits to his name, in addition to stage appearances across North America, ACTRA president David Sparrow knows the struggles of an artist’s life all too well.
“That comparatively successful career does not necessarily make me a household name, or financially stable. This is a tough business,” Sparrow said Tuesday morning to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage which gathered again in Ottawa to further discuss remuneration models for Canadian artists in the Canadian Copyright Act. Among those presenting were representatives from the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA), Bell Canada and Rogers.
As president of ACTRA, Sparrow (pictured in front of the committee) represents more than 25,000 audio-visual English-language professionals from across the country who work to project Canadian culture to the world.
He said the average unionized Canadian performer earns less than $11,000 per year through work in film, television and other recorded media. They build their careers working in a number of different media, earning small incomes from various sources. Sparrow said it’s the cumulative effect of these small incomes that ultimately help artists pay the bills between jobs.
In a bid to help guarantee some level of income for artists for their work throughout its use, Sparrow says ACTRA has taken steps to negotiate provisions into contracts, but he remained firm in his belief artists need copyright provisions in the Act to underpin the rights of audio-visual performers.
Sparrow said residuals and royalties, and payment for use and exploitation of work both in Canada and around the world is the compensation all performers deserve. “We need a made-in-Canada copyright solution that will give performers tools they and their unions need to go after the remuneration they are owed,” Sparrow said.
“Strong copyright law guards against unauthorized use or misuse of an artist’s work. There are international treaties that Canada can carefully implement to address these issues, but we can start by amending the Copyright Act to ensure Canadian audio-visual performers enjoy the same copyright protections that our audio performers already enjoy under the Act.”
Bell Canada’s SVP of regulatory affairs, Robert Malcolmson, insisted regardless of the remuneration revisions made to the Copyright Act, organized content theft negates any possible gains a revised Act could introduce. “There is an emerging consensus among creators, copyright owners, legitimate commercial users and intermediaries that large-scale and often commercially-motivated piracy operations are a growing problem in Canada,” Malcolmson said.
With piracy sites reportedly reaching over 15% of Canadian households, Malcolmson blames the “widely available and easy to use” illegal set-top boxes, combined with the more than 2.5 billion visits to various websites to access pirated content for the issue. The impact on the Canadian television industry, according to Malcolmson, is upwards of $650 million each year.
Rather than targeting individual copyright infringers, however, Bell and many others suggest going after the hosts of such material. “It is these large, infringing operations that harm the cultural industries that employ more than 600,000 Canadians, account for approximately 3% of our GDP and tell the uniquely Canadian stories that contribute to our shared cultural identity.”
“Criminal penalties are an effective deterrent that do not impact individual users or interfere with legitimate innovation. The Act already contains provisions for content theft undertaken for commercial purposes, but they deal with illegal copying while modern forms of content theft rely on streaming.” – Robert Malcolmson, Bell Canada
Included among the recommendations put forth by Bell is the modernization of the existing criminal provisions of the Copyright Act and making them technologically neutral. “Criminal penalties are an effective deterrent that do not impact individual users or interfere with legitimate innovation. The Act already contains provisions for content theft undertaken for commercial purposes, but they deal with illegal copying while modern forms of content theft rely on streaming. These provisions should be made technologically neutral so they apply equally to all forms of commercial scale content theft,” Malcolmson said.
Citing the U.S. and U.K.’s use of public and legal officials to carry out copyright enforcement actions, it’s Bell’s view that increased public enforcement of copyright via an administrative enforcement office would also be of benefit. Malcolmson said the office would in turn direct the RCMP to prioritize digital piracy investigations.
Malcolmson continued, saying the company wants the Copyright Act to “directly empower the CRTC or the courts to order intermediaries to contribute to remedying copyright infringements,” he said. “All players in the ecosystem have a role to play regarding compliance with the rules that support the appropriate rule of remuneration for creators.”
Discussing the dismissal of FairPlay’s CRTC application (which was supported by many, including ACTRA and Rogers), Malcolmson suggested a new provision be added to the Copyright Act that would apply more broadly to intermediaries including ISPs, web hosts, domain name registrars, search engines and others.
After touting its contributions and remuneration to the Canadian media landscape, Rogers Communications VP of regulatory cable, legal and regulatory affairs, Pam Dinsmore, acknowledged there is “leakage in the system.”
“We have watched the rise of streaming stolen content on pre-loaded set-top boxes with deepening concern,” she said. “In our view, the proliferation of unlawful IPTV services and pre-loaded set-top boxes is inextricably linked with decreased remuneration for creators.”
Dinsmore says that while Rogers has acted based on the available remedies under the Copyright Act, they are no longer sufficient and amendments must be made.
“The Act should make it a criminal violation for a commercial operation to profit from the theft and making available of rights holders’ exclusive and copyrighted content on streaming services,” she said, noting Rogers feels current civil prohibitions can no longer deter content theft.
Dinsmore said rights holders should also be given a mechanism by which they can apply for injunctive relief against any intermediary which comprises part of the online infrastructure that distributes stolen content, including ISPs, domain name registrars and search engines, among others. She said the current process for rights holders is terribly time consuming, financially prohibitive and too multi-faceted to be effective any longer.
The committee also heard from American streaming service Spotify on Tuesday. We’ll have more from that appearance later Wednesday.
