Canadian authors! Have you written to your MP yet about Bill C-11?

Image courtesy of Alistair Williamson and stock.xchng

In its current form, Bill C-11 is a catastrophe for authors, since it directly undermines copyright, which is how authors earn their meagre incomes.

-Paulina Ayala, MP forHonoré-Mercier,Quebec

All right, if you are American you might just want to ignore this post because today I’m doing a little public service announcement for Canadians.  As many of my friends in CANSCAIP (the Canadian Society of Children’s Authors, Illustrators and Performers) know already, there is a copyright bill called C-11 that is now going through its first reading in parliament.  Apparently it is almost identical to Bill C-32, which died when our last federal election was called.  (Full disclosure: I’ve read Bill C-11, which you can find here, but I never read C-32.)  This is rather sad considering the fact that there was a long series of consultations between the two bills where authors, illustrators, recording artists and many groups concerned about copyright testified.  Apparently no one was listening.

Now don’t get me wrong, Canada desperately needs to modernize the copyright act, which has not been updated since 1988, but there are a few issues which should cause authors and other creators great concern about this bill.  The main one that CANSCAIP and TWUC  (The Writers Union of Canada) bring up is the extension of “fair dealing” (which means uncompensated use) to “education.”

This means, as I understand it, that a teacher could copy a significant portion of a book (although not the entire book and exactly how much is a gray area) for her students without her school paying any compensation to the author or publisher.  As someone who has published a number of short stories in educational anthologies, this is a great concern for me.  In fact, before Witchlanders came out this fall, a large part of my writing income came from the educational market, so I find C-11 very worrying.

According to CANSCAIP’s copyright rep, the wonderful Sean Cassidy, who spoke at last week’s CANSCAIP meeting inToronto, “education” is a word with a very wide range of meanings. If this bill passes, so long as anyone can claim they are “educating,” they can copy a work free of charge.  Sean adds, “The bill says nothing concrete about what measures may be taken if a dispute arises over copyright. We are to refer to the Berne convention which has three vague ‘tests’ for determining the issue.”

If you’d like to write to your MP about Bill C-11, you can find his or her name here.  All you have to do is enter your postal code.  You can also follow the progress of Bill C-11 and see what all your MPs are saying about it at openparliment.ca