As a long-time music creator and author of song lyrics, I believe the Government must enact Copyright laws that ensure copyright is properly protected and fairly compensated. Protection of copyright is important for artists and for businesses, and benefits all Canadians and the Canadian economy.

Extension dur droit d'auteur 50 ans après sa mort. Ouin, c'est loin d'être l'enjeu principal des artistes vivants de ce monde. je ne crois pas qu'il faille en faire un débat. 50 ans c'est ok selon moi. Mais on devrait réviser la part de tarte qui reviens a l'Artiste quand il s'agit de vendre un cd. Par exemple l'énorme part qui revient à un éditeur qui sommes toutes donne 2-3 ou 4 coups de fil pour gagner sont dà» (50% des droits d'auteurs). Obliger les radios à payer des droits de diffusion (aujourd'hui c'est souvent l'artiste qui paye la radio pour y passer). En fait il faudrait baser la rémunération de chauqe partie en fonction du travail accomplit.

Strong public domain and expanded fair dealing are important for innovation, because new works are built upon older works, usually available the public domain and via fair dealing.

The government at the minimum should commit not to increase the copyright term. Berne convention permits this.

But to foster creativity, Canada should take leadership and link copyright term to creative activity, instead of linking it to author's life (or death). Copyright term should not last for X years after author's death, it should last for Y years after the work was communicated by the creator to the intended audience. Society does not pay for author's life; it pays for author's creativity. This change not only links reward to creativity, but also makes it simpler to assess the expiration of copyright on a work.

A shorter term would act as a filter, and a quality filter is good for the society. Great works created by personalities with charisma are known to retain and even increase their value: they are sold for real money without special marketing efforts even in the era of "de-facto everything free". Because great works retain their value without regard to copyright term, copyright term matters more for average works than for quality ones. So, now there is an incentive to create a quality work that is "above" the copyright term just by virtue of its quality.

Another possible approach to the above filter is to give a short initial copyright term (like 5 years) and letting the creator express interest and extend it once or twice (or even up to current term of 50 years). This would give benefit to the society without impacting the creators too much: works that generate income can still benefit their creators and orphans enter into the public domain pretty fast. This term extension could be done for a fee payable to the government, and the rationale is quite simple: if the work generates income, the creator is interested in extending its term and is able to afford the fee; otherwise the work does not bring as much value and can just fall out into public domain and someone else may build another work upon it that has more value.

In case of the government, who is paid by taxpayers and works for taxpayers, a different model should be used and crown copyright should be eliminated. This will bring more transparency and enable citizens and companies to solve problems that were found in government-sponsored research. It may mean more taxes for taxpayers, but the benefits of increased transparency and reuse of government work will outweigh the cost in the long term.