Absolutely. The educational fair dealing exception, in my view, is the single most widely misunderstood provision of the act. In my view, it does a few very important things, but they're not major things. The one thing that it doesn't do is undermine business models or undermine revenues enjoyed by authors as a result of collective licensing in the educational community.
I'm sure you've all seen the articles in the newspapers saying that educational fair dealing will permit wholesale copying of textbooks or will permit replacing textbooks with course packs, with bits of copying here and there. It won't do any of those things. And it won't do those things because they're not fair. It's not going to pass.... They're educational, absolutely. They're educational, but they're not fair. Those strategies replace a royalty-bearing thing, the textbook, which authors have come to expect getting paid for, and rightly so. Certainly we would never support any provision that sought to undermine that institution.
So then the question is, what does educational fair dealing do? In my view, it does two things that are extraordinarily important.
One, it gives teachers the confidence to bring technology into the classroom. Public educational institutions are incredibly conservative organizations and very risk averse. There is a reluctance to bring in new technologies that may incur liability. Educational fair dealing covers that. Then you do have the confidence that you can bring in video, you can bring in the Internet, you can bring in new devices, and you can bring in social networking. You can bring a lot of great things into the classroom, innovative things, things that we haven't even thought of yet, and enhance our children's educational experience. That's what a good copyright law should endorse and should support.
The second thing it does, which I think is actually even more important, is that it opens up a closed curriculum. What I mean by this is that it allows students to bring their own content into the classroom. It allows students to get up in front of the class and perhaps distribute a poem or an article they've found. It allows them to do innovative things, things they have never done before. Instead of doing an essay, they're going to do a YouTube presentation in front of the class. It allows them to be innovative and it allows them to bring content that's not on the set curriculum into the classroom.
That is so important, because that allows us to get new Canadian authors before students, rather than having the same set of novels that have been in the school for 30 years. Now we can get something in there that's brand new, that no one has seen before, that's fresh off the press, something that a student has discovered and wants to share. That's what education is about and that's why educational fair dealing is so important.