Bill C-11 Committee on March 6th, 2012

[Pierre Nantel, NDP, Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, QC]

So that's really what Ms. Hemmings was saying about the evil and bright sides of TPMs. I guess you are involved in these discussions too, with this.

[Jacqueline Hushion]

Of course.

[Pierre Nantel, NDP, Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, QC]

Would you, Mr. Nordal or Mr. McIntyre, have anything to add to this?

[Greg Nordal]

Yes.

We support a number of institutions. If a visually impaired student wants the materials, we provide them through our repository, centrally managed. Certainly a lot of our digital products—there are very few of them in use today—have audio components for the hearing impaired, for example, or for the sight impaired. They can actually hear the audio books built right into our digital text.

It's a very small usage, but we've done a number of things to respond. We've worked with a number of other agencies. I think the educational publishing community has done a very good job supporting the visually and hearing impaired.

[Dr. Gerry McIntyre]

Just by way of supplement, the exception for the print disabled is the classic paradigm of what an exception can be, because it is specifically defined for an identifiable group.

[The Chair, NDP, Glenn Thibeault]

Monsieur Nantel, you have 15 seconds.

[Pierre Nantel, NDP, Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher, QC]

Okay. I'll let those 15 seconds go.

[The Chair, NDP, Glenn Thibeault]

Thank you, Monsieur Nantel.

Mr. Moore, you have five minutes.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses.

I don't recall from your opening, Ms. Hemmings, if you also represent law school libraries.

[Mary Hemmings]

I do, yes.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

Okay.

Thinking back—and it wasn't that long ago that I was in a law school library quite regularly—the protections we had then against unlawful copyright was that there was a photocopier there, but the price per page was prohibitive. You wouldn't necessarily stand there and photocopy a book.

Now we have a whole digital age when...aside from the fact that no one I went to school with would ever think of doing that anyway.

[Mary Hemmings]

Right.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

But now, in this digital age, something like that can be done with the click of a mouse.

When you were summing up in your remarks, you used pretty strong terms when you mentioned that digital locks were “evil and good”. I know that in your context, law libraries, you're dealing with some very expensive material; a great deal of work goes into the production of that material.

Can you give us both sides, the good and the evil, as you see it, of digital locks?

[Mary Hemmings]

I'll talk to you about this from an academic law school library perspective, because that's what I'm most familiar with.

Currently, we subscribe to Canadian e-books called Essentials of Canadian Law from Irwin Law Inc. We buy the print books and put them out on the reserved shelves, and we also have the e-books. The e-books are very popular among the students because they can all access them. There isn't just the one copy on contract law. They are preparing an assignment, and they can all access it, and that's not a problem. The problem—the evil problem—is when you enter into a licence or a contract with a distributor and find that the rules are so restrictive that you can't even possibly comply with the needs of the users.

For example, I recently bought a U.K. e-book from England. It came in on a particular platform. I was going to print one chapter for the benefit of one faculty member who wanted to read it not on the screen, but wanted to read it in print. I knew that one chapter was a perfectly allowable thing to do. I made a mistake and I printed off the wrong 20 pages. I was locked. I could not get back in there. I could view the chapter, but I couldn't print it for the benefit of the faculty member. I had to call him into my office so he could read it from my screen. That's how evil these digital locks can be. They can be very good in terms of regulating how materials are used; yet, at the same time, they close down what we see as our traditional ways of people being able to communicate in a scholarly fashion.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

Okay.

Judging from the comment you're making, another word for evil in the situation you cite is “effective”, right?

[Mary Hemmings]

Right.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

It was an effective lock. It did not allow someone to circumvent it. In your case, there was a mistake made. Those are some of the challenges we have in dealing with these locks.

Do you think it's a matter of degrees? Is there a way the line could be pushed one way or another to accommodate protection of the copyright material, but also accessibility for the purchaser?

[Mary Hemmings]

Absolutely. I think the TPMs provide an opportunity for the library community to be able to negotiate how they want to use their materials. On the other hand, we have to remember that we're kind of used to using print materials. We've been so pampered by print. You can take a book home and, as I said, make 400 copies of the latest best seller and set up a little booth on the street. That is not fair. That's not right and not fair, and probably not very economically feasible for the individual who is doing that kind of thing.

I think what I'm trying to say is that libraries are not in the business of policing how people use the materials they want to borrow. I think that is our biggest concern.

[The Chair, NDP, Glenn Thibeault]

You would have to do it under Mr. Moore's time, which is five seconds.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

I can't beat that. Thank you.

[The Chair, NDP, Glenn Thibeault]

Thank you, Mr. Moore.

We will now move on to Mr. Dionne Labelle pour cinq minutes, s'il vous plaît.

[Pierre Dionne Labelle, NDP, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

For many stakeholders, the fair use of a work for educational purposes seems to be an irritant, and some feel that there is a lack of precision with regard to what is fair in that situation. Several observers expressed concerns with regard to the application of this clause.

I tried to imagine its potential repercussions, which are not known to us now. In fact, there are several consequences linked to that provision which are not known at the present time.

So let's imagine that I am a professor of film at a university and that I have a digitized book in my possession which I purchased from this lady, which analyzes the disastrous repercussions of the exceptions to copyright introduced by the Conservatives. I decide to communicate with my students through a website, and on my website, I put three chapters of this book. I go and rent the movie Good Cop, Bad Cop because I also want to evaluate, in my course, the importance of Quebec culture in Canadian identity. I download this material on my website for educational purposes only, of course. Then I order a digital book from the library and I add it to my website. Now my students have access to all of this material and it seems to me that I have done nothing wrong.

However, in the first two cases, I have done something that is prejudicial to the commercial rights of these works. Do you think that these situations could be possible? You can imagine the losses that would be incurred if all professors started to use digital technologies. To my mind, this bill, with regard to the exemption, is not sufficiently clear: we don't know what is allowed by the law and what is not.

Everything I would do in that case would be digital and would be allowed thanks to the exemption we are discussing, and this would be prejudicial to you financially, is that correct?

Moreover, I would have to destroy my notes after 30 days. Since I borrowed the material from the library, after the 30-day period, I would not only have to destroy my notes, but my students would have to do so as well. What an incredible scenario, and yet it is possible!

What do you think, madam?

[Jacqueline Hushion]

I agree. We understand exactly where you're coming from on the 30 days.

Yes, you're right, in the first two instances you would have infringed because you took the whole work.

We are not opposed to fair dealing. We already have fair dealing in the act for a number of purposes. All Canadians benefit from it. Publishers benefit from it, and their authors and researchers benefit from it. What we are opposed to is an exception that is ill defined and unstructured, and we want clarity around the exception. We're not saying take it way; we're saying clarify it.

I have given our joint proposed amendment to the clerk. I did that as we came in.

We believe that in looking at the government's backgrounder and comparing it with what the education community says the reality will be, which is not a great increase in free uses, and combining that with clarity should mean that the government meets its objective: that the education community is still well served, even though there is now some further definition around that exception; and that publishing—I'm not going to say it cures everything—at least has a good chance, a fighting chance, to increase the proportion of its works that are original indigenous Canadian works in education, as opposed to more of the U.S. and the U.K. coming into Canada.

[Pierre Dionne Labelle, NDP, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

I know that you smiled, Mr. Nordal, during my case study, but these are situations that could arise if the exemption regarding educational purposes is not made more specific.