April 18, 2024 – The April 8, 2024 opinion piece “Canadian writers, visual artists, and publishers need copyright reform now” misrepresents the Canadian education sector and universities with respect to copyright and the use of course materials. The piece fails to recognize more than a decade of digital transformation in both the publishing and education sectors.
How course materials are delivered and used by educators and students has changed dramatically in the past few decades. Universities currently license electronic access to e-books, newspapers and journal articles, and pay transactional licences for small excerpts of materials that are beyond their conservative institutional fair dealing guidelines. Students buy textbooks, including novels and poetry collections, in digital formats.
The inflated figure that the authors assert as lost revenue is questionable at best. It assumes the continuation of an antiquated course pack model where systematic, inappropriate double payment for materials was taking place. It was double-dipping, not “earned income.”Universities have since shifted to licensed digital content.
The authors further assert that “copying across the education sector has continued at the same pace of hundreds of millions of pages per year. It’s likely even increasing.” In fact, universities have seen a significant decline in copying and many libraries have removed photocopiers entirely.
In 2020-2021 Canadian university libraries reported spending $388M on licensed resources, and those licences enable a wide range of copyright-compliant uses. This digital content represents more than 90% of materials acquired through these libraries, giving our university communities access to billions of pages of legally acquired and paid for electronic content.
Universities represent and support both creators and users of copyrighted materials and are committed to working within the framework for copyright provided by Canadian legislation and our highest court. There has been a succession of Supreme Court decisions that provided clarity around user rights and affirmed that collective licensing is not the only way to manage copyright commitments.
Any regulatory change that supports the independent publishing sector should be based on evidence that bears up under scrutiny, respects Canadian jurisprudence, and demonstrably assists authors. Copyright law is not intended and should not be used to address the twentieth-century shift to digital product lines in the publishing sector.
In short, market issues cannot be resolved by copyright reform.
Brett Waytuck
President, Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL)
Dean, University Libraries and Archives, University of Regina
Regina
Susan Haigh
Executive Director, CARL
Ottawa
