A copyright tariff looks like a question about money. How much do television distributors owe for retransmitting distant signals, and how should that amount be divided among the organizations representing rights holders? Those questions matter, but so does the date when the payment comes due.
In Bell Canada v. Copyright Collective of Canada, 2026 FCA 107, a seemingly ordinary date became the reason Canada's Federal Court of Appeal sent part of a television royalty decision back to the Copyright Board. It's a useful reminder that creative industries depend on more than the price of the rights they use. The timing of payment matters too.
The tariff covered distant television signals retransmitted in Canada from 2014 to 2018. The Copyright Board first decided the tariff in 2019. The Federal Court of Appeal granted judicial review in 2021, the Board reconsidered matters in 2024, and another successful judicial review followed in May 2025. In June 2025, the Board issued its second redetermination, its third final decision about the same tariff.
That history explains why the parties were back in court, but it wasn't the royalty rates themselves that brought them there this time.
The Board had chosen September 30, 2019 as the settlement date. That's the date when amounts owing under the tariff are due and after which interest accrues at a higher rate. By the time the Board chose it in June 2025, the date was nearly 6 years in the past.
Both sides accepted that something had gone wrong. The date conflicted with the Board's usual practice, and the Board hadn't explained why it had chosen it.
The distributors, including Bell, Rogers, Cogeco, Vidéotron, Telus and Shaw, raised the date with the Board through a new application for judicial review. They also identified a separate issue with rates for mid sized transmission systems. The Board corrected that second issue because it was a clerical error.
It wouldn't correct the date.
The Board took the position that its jurisdiction was constrained by earlier decisions, including prior rulings of the Federal Court of Appeal. In legal terms, it was concerned about having finished its task and no longer having the power to revisit it.
The appeal court didn't accept that reasoning. Justice George Locke, writing for a unanimous panel with Justices Sylvie Roussel and Elizabeth Walker, explained that the Board's previous decisions didn't justify leaving an unexplained settlement date in place.
If the concern was that the Board had completed its 2025 decision, the court could remove that obstacle by setting the date aside. If the concern was that an earlier appeal had limited everything the Board could consider, that misunderstood what the earlier court had actually decided.
The previous appeal hadn't determined the settlement date. It hadn't forbidden the Board from making adjustments that followed naturally from the redetermination.
There was another wrinkle. Changing a settlement date can affect related transitional provisions, and the parties initially disagreed about whether those provisions were within the scope of the new application.
They ultimately agreed the court should address them together. The court found that the relief requested was broad enough to do so, set aside the settlement date and other transitional provisions, and returned those questions to the Copyright Board. It made no award of costs.
The court didn't set a replacement date, revise the royalty rates or decide what either side must ultimately pay. Its ruling concerned the Board's authority and the reasonableness of the timing arrangements, not a fresh determination of the value of the underlying rights.
It's tempting to treat payment terms as something left to accountants after the real work has been done. Anyone who's tried to manage a creative business, a licence or even a household budget knows otherwise. A payment due today is different from one due years ago, particularly when interest changes after the due date.
That doesn't make the distributors right about every part of the tariff, or the rights collectives wrong about what the work is worth. It explains why a dispute about an old date was worth returning to court.
The decision is also an example of what judicial review can and can't do. The Federal Court of Appeal could correct the legal problem and return the issue to the institution responsible for making the tariff. It didn't take over that institution's job.
For creators, broadcasters, distributors and anyone trying to understand how Canadian copyright actually works, the lesson is surprisingly practical. The value of a right isn't always fully described by a dollar figure. Sometimes the date beside it changes everything.
Source: Bell Canada v. Copyright Collective of Canada, 2026 FCA 107, Federal Court of Appeal, May 29, 2026, paragraphs 1 to 11.