Happy New Year to everyone! The start of a new year often symbolizes renewal and Copibec certainly hopes that will be the case for the arts and culture sphere and copyright.
We ended 2019 by paying out the royalties collected from the education sector. Over $3 million was distributed to copyright owners whose content was used by institutions at the elementary, high school and college levels.
The coming year will be the final stage in implementing the financial provisions of the settlement reached in the lawsuit involving copyright owners and Universit茅 Laval. Our team is currently taking the last few steps before paying out royalties, which will be distributed in the coming weeks to the copyright owners concerned. Make sure you don鈥檛 miss any information about your copyright collective鈥檚 activities by following us on Facebook and Twitter.
We hope that 2020 will be the year the Copyright Act is finally updated to ensure that the contributions made to our society by authors and publishers will be recognized for their true value.
After last fall鈥檚 federal election, we have a new government and a new Canadian Heritage minister. Following a major mobilization effort at the Montreal book fair and the publication of the Canadian Heritage Committee's report, the time has definitely come to complete the process first undertaken in 2012.
Turning our attention to in-house operations, Christian Liboiron, who was in charge of our Businesses and Governments team, has been given a promotion to become that team鈥檚 Director. Xavier Daffe-Bordeleau, who was an officer for the education team, has left to take on other challenges. Morgane Chaffiraud will be taking over to handle requests for digital content. We would like to wish them both much success in their new positions.
Fr茅d茅rique Couette
Executive Director