3. Cultural Industries Issues

The cultural industries face challenges in making a successful transition to digital platforms, or even survive such a transition. (See Table 1 which seeks to clarify the meaning of commonly used terms to describe this sector). Some common challenges for many of the cultural industries include diminished regulatory protection and limited fiscal room for new government expenditures.

Table 1 - Some terminology clarifications

Terminology	Definition
“Cultural industries” or “cultural media industries”	A convention to capture the sectors that are included in the longstanding government goal of strengthening Canadian culture. These industries include: TV and film production, book publishing, magazine publishing, music, interactive media including video games, and radio and TV broadcasting.
“Entertainment and media industries”	Another descriptor for cultural industries but with a more commercial connotation.
“Digital media”	Cultural industries in a digital state together with supporting technological infrastructure; in turn the same digital media technologies can be deployed in industries other than culture.

The federal government has a variety of regulatory policies, tax incentives, legislative provisions, crown corporations, and subsidy programs to support cultural industries. The cultural industries issues arising from the new digital environment are discussed in the following four areas:

• Challenges and opportunities in new digital platforms;
• Lack of capital to exploit intellectual property (IP);
• Role of private and public broadcasting;
• Modernization of copyright legislation.

The following subsections outline how each of these issue areas relates to the consideration of a national digital strategy.