Media Advisory: Where would Google be without creators and the distortion of copyright protections?

Toronto, Nov. 2, 2017: In a ground-breaking report, Music Canada, a national trade organization, documents the scale of harm being caused by the Value Gap – defined as the significant disparity between the value of creative content that is accessed, particularly through user upload content services like YouTube, and the revenues returned to the people and businesses who create it.

“This is the story you will not hear from Google,” says Graham Henderson, President and CEO of Music Canada.  “YouTube would never have emerged as the largest music service without distorting the use of safe harbour protections in copyright law that were created to protect ‘mere conduits’ or ‘dumb pipes.’  We now know that today’s digital platforms are the smartest pipes that have ever been imagined.”

Creators and governments around the world are taking notice, and taking action. In Canada, thousands of musicians, authors, poets, visual artists, playwrights and other members of the creative class, have urged the Canadian government to address the Value Gap in a campaign called Focus On Creators.

The Value Gap: Its Origins, Impacts and a Made-in-Canada Approach is available for download at https://musiccanada.com/resources/research/the-value-gap-report/.

Interviews are available at request.

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For more information please contact:

Corey Poole
Communications Coordinator
Music Canada
647-808-7359