Editorial by our Executive Director


Editorial by our Executive Director

As a crucial year for the arts and culture sector draws to a close, your copyright collective has put together a special newsletter devoted entirely to copyright. In it, we give you an overview of the significant events from the past year and look towards the future to ensure that the Copyright Act is effective in protecting the rights and interests of creators and their publishers.

When the federal election campaign was launched, we contacted the candidates to ask them to put culture at the forefront of the political discussion and explain their party’s position on the issues affecting the arts and culture sector. Despite our efforts and those by many other organizations, scant attention was paid to that sector during the campaign.

Now that a month has passed since the election, we’re reminding our new government that an updated Copyright Act is needed following the review initiated in 2017 and the Parliamentary committees’ reports tabled this year. We’re also reaffirming that all work deserves to be compensated, and copyrighted content is no exception.

The text and image content producers represented by Copibec continue to feel the impact of the 2012 amendments and the time has certainly come to get it right.

The solutions to make the Act balanced are well known and do not require us to create some kind of utopia. The conclusions in the Canadian Heritage Committee's report confirm it and our government has an obligation to move in that direction to keep our culture strong and encourage creative efforts here in Quebec and across Canada.

All the factors needed to protect the creative process are already in place. The only thing missing is some political courage!

Here’s what we’re asking for

  1. Limit the application of fair dealing whenever licensing is possible at a reasonable cost through a copyright collective
  2. For copyright infringement cases, set the amount of statutory damages at a level sufficient to serve as a deterrent against legal proceedings

For complete details about where we think we should be heading, please refer to our recommendations in the brief we submitted to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage (La gestion collective : un outil moderne pour une rémunération équilibrée).

Frédérique Couette
Executive Director