While I have served as an Access Copyright Board director for four years now, this is the first time I have had the pleasure of addressing you all in the Annual Report as Board Chair.

The fact that I have taken the reins of the Access Copyright Board at such a critical inflection point for the organization is not lost on me. ...more

Access Copyright has worked relentlessly to mobilize its community of stakeholders and individual creators and publishers to push for a positive resolution to the issue of the harm caused by the ambiguity over the scope of educational fair dealing and its disastrous impact on Canadian creators and publishers.

It’s a marathon that the creative sector has been running for over a decade now.

There is no doubt that these tremendous, collective efforts were critical to obtaining the federal government’s commitment in the 2022 federal budget to repair Canada’s Copyright Act and restore a functioning marketplace for educational works. It has been rightly hailed as an important step forward. That’s why it’s all the more frustrating to note that since the tabling of the budget, no action has been taken by Ottawa to implement its promise to creators and publishers.

That adds one more year on top of an already impossibly long ten-year wait.

It’s why this important work can at times feel like it’s done in vain. The weight of the responsibility can rest heavy and I admire how so many keep mustering up the grit and determination to keep pushing the government to do what so desperately needs to be done.

In 2023, we are all preoccupied with one primary concern: creators and publishers can’t wait any longer for the government to act. More to the point, they can’t afford to wait any longer.

The royalties that Access Copyright collects and then distributes are such an important revenue stream. A study conducted a few years ago found that these royalties represented 20% of creator income and 16% of publisher profits. Since 2012, Canadian creators and publishers have been deprived of $190 million in unpaid royalties under tariffs certified by the Copyright Board of Canada. But it’s not simply a matter of dollar and cents. It really comes down to whether the government will restore the conditions necessary to ensure the continued creation of Canadian stories.

Time is of the essence. The government is on the clock.

It needs to take action now to support creators and publishers in Canada before the clock runs out....less

When a group of Canadian creators and publishers came together to form Access Copyright (then known as CANCOPY) in 1988, they were driven by a deep sense of purpose....more

It was to provide a means for creators and publishers to easily and effectively manage the reproduction rights in their work and ensure fair compensation for mass copying by multiple users, while also providing an opportunity for those who wanted to copy and share published material to be able to do it the right way quickly.

The services that Access Copyright provides are hard to encapsulate in a simple list.

We represent over 13,000 creators and over 675 publisher affiliates. We administer over 1,000 licensing agreements to license the copying of published works and, since our founding, we have distributed over $470 million to creators and publishers. But the value of our work supporting our stakeholders goes far beyond that. That’s why Access Copyright educates our affiliates and licensees about copyright law, creates new licensing models like the Read Aloud Canadian Books program when the need arises, holds webinars on new developments in Web3 and continues to work to solve the attribution problem for creative works. We also champion and uphold the rights of creators and publishers and defend those rights when necessary.

All that we do is driven by an unwavering belief in the value that our creators and publishers contribute to our culture each day, the respect that they deserve for their work and the benefits that our licensees see in our licensing services.

Almost thirty-five years now from our founding, Access Copyright’s ability to continue to serve our rightsholder and licensee communities is in peril. The future is uncertain. And with each passing day, it becomes even more so as we keep waiting for the federal government to fulfil its 2022 budget commitment “to [ensure] the Copyright Act protects all creators and copyright holders…. [and] ensure a sustainable educational publishing industry, including fair remuneration for creators and copyright holders, as well as a modern and innovative marketplace that can efficiently serve copyright users.”

But, as much as Access Copyright’s future gravely concerns me, it’s the future of Canadian stories that keeps me up at night. Because those two things are so deeply connected.

The destructive impact of the ambiguity over the scope of the education fair dealing exception, which has been in place since 2012, to Canada’s creative sector is well-known and widely documented. It is damage borne by Canadian creators and publishers that will ultimately be felt by each and every one of us: the teacher looking for the perfect book to spark their students’ imagination, the grandparent hoping to share a story to help her granddaughter learn more about who she is and the reader wishing to discover what it’s like to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.

There is a deep and dire urgency for the federal government to take action and live up to its promise to Canadian creators and publishers. We will continue to do what we have been doing - being relentless in imploring Ottawa to do what it knows needs to be done to support Canadian creators and preserve the future of Canadian stories....less