I am an employee of a publishing company

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am a publisher (or an employee of a publishing company — describe your company and/or your job) whose company's prosperity depends upon the sale of the content we produce. Our revenues depend on product sales as well as on fees from the reproduction of our products under collective licences. This income pays royalties and advances to creators, salaries to our employees, rent, overheads and inputs, and provides our business with the means to take risks and make investments as a producer of Canadian content.

Copyright should exist to protect producers and creators and to provide them with incentives to contribute to Canada's rich body of original content. Copyright law should ensure that the people who worked so hard to produce works are compensated when others use them.

Collective licences exist to allow universities, schools, corporations and governments to make copies of works while ensuring fair and appropriate compensation. This is a system that works well, but it is imperiled.

I am worried that new exceptions and expanded fair dealing could significantly undermine me as an employee of a publishing company, the company's authors, and, more important, damage the market for books, magazines and newspapers published in Canada.

I want Copyright Act reforms to follow these principles as outlined by the government for Bill C-61 which died on the Order Paper at the time of the last election:

• The rights of those who hold copyright must be fairly balanced with the needs of users to access copyright works.
• The Copyright Act must provide clear, predictable and fair rules to allow Canadians to derive benefits from their creations.
• The Copyright Act should foster innovation in an effort to attract investment and high-paying jobs to Canada.
• Canada must ensure that its copyright framework for the Internet is in line with international standards.

Canada's Copyright Act needs to be reformed because:

• New digital technologies have made it cheap and easy for anyone to copy files and make money from them, or to copy and distribute works without recognizing the need to get paid for these uses of those works.
• By failing to take action, our government has allowed a culture that reduces intellectual property's ability to flourish. The climate for intellectual property has been spoiled. This is a culture that assumes copyright works can be expropriated without proper compensation for those who invested their talents, skills, time and hard work to create them.
• Canada's Copyright Act is badly outdated. We are years behind our key trading partners in modernizing our copyright laws for the digital age. Canadian copyright law should recognize international standards by implementing and ratifying the WIPO, WCT and WPPT Treaties. We need to feel secure when we trade with other nations — secure in the knowledge that our works may safely travel the Internet to places that reciprocate protections.
• We need rules to discourage the unauthorized taking of other people's property without compensation.
• It is a national responsibility to help protect publishers' and creators' investments of time, money and creativity through a modernized Copyright Act.

Sincerely,

Amanda Murray
Ann MacDonald
Carolin Sweig
Cliff D'Souza
Diane Masschaele
Erica Patenaude
Gerda Hockridge
Haseeb Khan
Heather Brubacher
James Ludwig
Jen Parks
Jordanna Caplan
Patricia Langford
Patrick Lam
Rachelle Kay
Samantha McGowan
Susanne Cox