Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
My name is David Molenhuis. I am here today on behalf of the Canadian Federation of Students, Canada's largest national students organization. I am accompanied by my colleague Noah Stewart, who will answer any questions that members of the committee may have. Our more than 600,000 members are students at universities and colleges, both undergraduate and graduate.
Students are users and creators. We need both ready access to the works of others and the ability to protect our work from unfair use and appropriation. I would like to begin by addressing Bill C-32's proposal to add education to the enumerated categories of fair dealing. While this falls short of the flexible definition of fair dealing that students have called for, it is a reasonable step forward. Listing education explicitly will only be a modest change to the act, which already allows fair dealing for the purposes of research, private study, and criticism—categories that include the vast majority of educational uses—so long as the use is, of course, fair.
Fair dealing involves a two-part test. While Bill C-32 proposes adding education to the list of permissible dealings, it does not propose to alter the second part of the test, which is the fairness analysis. It will not permit the wholesale copying of textbooks, as some have falsely claimed, nor will it permit teachers to replace the use of textbooks and novels with photocopied excerpts.
In Bill C-32, fairness remains the cornerstone of the law. If a dealing isn't fair, it infringes on copyright no matter how educational it might be. What the proposed expansion will do is promote innovative uses of copyrighted works--for example, a teacher showing a clip from a film to their class, or a student distributing a magazine clipping to accompany a presentation, or even a homework assignment in which students build a website dedicated, for example, to the work of a modern Canadian artist.
Post-secondary institutions have often proven reluctant to rely on fair dealing out of fear of litigious rights holders. The inclusion of education will reassure students, teachers, and other members of the educational community that their uses can qualify as fair dealing, provided they are in fact fair.
While some individuals have claimed that educational fair dealing is unclear and will lead to excessive litigation, this is far from true. The proposed expansion will bring greater clarity to the act, filling in the grey zone between research and private study. Moreover, the bounds of fair dealing have been well established by successive decisions of the Supreme Court, the Federal Court of Appeal, and the Copyright Board. The education community is a major contributor to Canada's creative industry. College and university students spend over $1.3 billion on education materials each year. Moreover, this is one area in which spending on copyrighted works is actually increasing, having grown more than 35% in the last decade.
Expanding fair dealing will not diminish these expenditures. Rather, it will encourage students and teachers to make even greater use of copyrighted works, extending the reach of authors and creators and further supporting Canada's creative sector.
The broad language currently used in the bill supports fair dealing as a right for all, not a special exception for a privileged minority. It ensures that educational fair dealing is available to everyone from a church group, for example, to a music teacher, or even to a university student. Educational fair dealing embodies the very best of Canadian values. It recognizes that a commitment to supporting creators can and must be fairly balanced against a commitment to education.
Although by and large Bill C-32 reflects the balance sought by Canadians, one glaring omission is in the approach taken on digital locks. These provisions would stop, for example, a student from using a graph or picture from an e-textbook in their essay; a teacher from using a clip from a video in a class presentation; and a musician from using pieces of recorded music to create an entirely new song. This approach is especially of concern for members of the education community who are increasingly turning to the use of electronic course packs, e-textbooks, electronic reserves, and other digital materials.
Although the bill includes explicit protections for digital locks, it fails to provide any mechanisms to assist users who wish to access locked materials for lawful purposes. Criminalizing the legal use of these materials strips away any and all user rights and gives copyright owners absolute control over how their works are used. The proposal should be amended to modify the definition of circumvention to apply only to infringing uses. This would address many of these problems.
One last area of concern is the special exception for delivery of lessons by telecommunication found in proposed section 30.01. This section is unnecessarily complex and will hamper digital learning. The requirement that lessons be destroyed after the end of a course will force already overworked teachers to rebuild their courses from scratch each term, and students to delete their learning materials at the end of each semester.
Providing for the digital delivery of course materials could be better achieved by simply modifying the definition of “premises” of an educational institution to include any place from which persons are authorized by the institution--that is, including staff, teachers, and students--to access it.
That said, I'll thank the chair and welcome any questions that committee members might have.