ACTRA national executive director Stephen Waddell has seen record labels decimated by legal wrangling over peer-to-peer online music file sharing. So he doesn’t want to witness the same fate befall movie and TV rights holders expecting compensation in the Internet age.

Waddell is proposing a copyright solution that amounts to voluntary collective licensing and administration of rights holders’ content.

In effect, consumers would pay a one-time fee at the point of purchase for content, which is then collected and returned to content creators and makers. In return, consumers receive free and unrestricted use of content across a range of digital platforms.

Waddell points to a Canadian precedent in the private copying levy, where consumers pay an extra 24 cents for a blank cassette tape, or 21 cents for a blank CD or minidisc, with the proceeds returned to rights holders for the private use of their content.

‘As a result of paying that licence fee, you’re entitled to use music content in your CD player, or transfer it to your hard drive, put it on [your] iPod and use it across multiple platforms,’ he explains.

Likewise, music songwriters entrust their copyrights to a collective administrator like SOCAN, which returns royalties for performance rights.

Waddell wants the so-called blank media levy extended to audiovisual product as video content increasingly gets distributed online, either for free or for purchase via iTunes and other emerging digital platforms.

‘If you create a movie and distribute it online, through collective licensing, the consumer pays at the time of purchase, and in compensation, rights holders receive part of the retail sales price,’ he argues.

Collective licensing and administration, Waddell adds, represents a middle way between the interests of content creators and makers on the one hand, and consumers on the other.

‘There’s a conflict between creators and makers who have rights and remuneration interests, and consumers who want to take and use a product on varied platforms and media and not have to pay a fee or be restricted,’ he says.

Waddell values the simplicity of collective licensing and administration. Rather than see indie film and TV producers chase individual consumers in the courts for payment, rights holders secure a statutory right for compensation from the Copyright Board of Canada.

That independent tribunal then sets a tariff for use of content to be applied to the retail sales price. The fee is in turn collected and returned to content creators and makers.

Waddell also sees virtue in varied industry players joining hands to enforce the rights of copyright holders as consumers pursue their own fair-use rights.

‘If we do it collectively, we’ll all benefit. In a big-picture sense, content creators and makers now see that consumers don’t want to pay extra for content across multiple platforms. In the face of that, the makers and creators should band together,’ he argues.

Waddell sees yet another precedent for collective licensing in the eventual settlement of the bitter Canadian actors strike in 2007, which remained hung over the thorny issue of new media royalties.

ACTRA and the CFTPA, representing indie producers, agreed that ACTRA members would receive a 3.6% share of Internet revenues for performance rights.

‘It’s basically the same idea. It’s the long tail, it’s getting a piece of the action,’ he says of an incremental solution to Canada’s copyright conundrum.