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A way to ensure that people pay a fair fee to producers of the content, not a penalty, nothing punitive
Daniel Bernhard, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting
Canada’s stab at a law might follow Australia’s proposed effort based on fair trading. Canberra legislators may have a final draft of it within weeks, Rod Sims, chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, told the Associated Press this month.
Facebook warned Australia that it might simply bar local news rather than pay for it, while Google said it could impact its search results and user data, according to the AP report.
Efforts in Europe to rein in the tech giants through copyright laws so far haven’t been successful.
“There’s a real virtue in the Australian model in that it’s very fast and it’s direct negotiations with the government,” Hinds said. “The European model is a little more complicated.”
The best option is to adopt a pay-for-use fee structure, Bernhard said, so the money goes directly to creators, not as a tax on tech companies to the government — something similar to how music is billed to radio stations. He cited a study by Jean Hugues-Roy, of Université de Québec à Montréal, saying Facebook alone costs Canadian newspapers $135 million a year in lost revenue.
“This is about market power and finding a way to ensure that people pay a fair fee to producers of the content, not a penalty, nothing punitive, just a fair compensation,” Bernhard said.
Zimbel said he recently chanced upon old sales slips showing the band’s income from as recently as 2007 and how they dwarfed today’s receipts because of online streaming. “You don’t get rich playing in a nine-piece jazz band,” he said. “But I could not believe the numbers. They were huge compared to what we see now.”
The musician said he typically sees a rate of $50 for 250,000 streams, whereas the first month of a record release 13 years ago netted $7,800.
“It’s not only that you’re not making money from streaming,” Zimbel said. “It’s that all physical sales and downloading sales have evaporated now as well because people are only streaming.”
