Mr. Chairman, members, thank you for inviting Athabasca University. We feel that this is a very important event for us.
I'd like to introduce Troy Tait, who is our director of government affairs. I'm the associate vice-president, research, at Athabasca University, and I'm also the Canadian UNESCO Commonwealth of Learning chair in open education resources. That might give you an idea of why I'm taking the position I am today.
Athabasca University is Canada's open university. All our students are online. We have over 40,000 students, in every province and territory of Canada and in over 100 countries. You can see how important the use of the Internet is for us, and that copyright use, on the Internet and in a digital environment, is absolutely essential to our existence, as it is for traditional universities, who are more and more going online. There isn't a traditional university today that doesn't have a very large percentage of its content and its teaching and learning online.
I'd like to remind members—and I was a bit discouraged by some of the comments this morning—that copyright started not to conserve the rights of authors; on the contrary, the first copyright law was a law for the encouragement of learning. That's the point of view I'm coming from as an educator: copyright is for encouragement of learning. They thought it would help learning, if they gave authors certain limited rights. I can see that it's being more and more morphed into just authors' rights and that people are forgetting the learning component. So I am pleased that in this bill we have added learning as part of the fair dealing provisions.
Generally, we support the bill. We're talking about some minor exceptions that will improve it and make it usable in a 21st-century environment.
E-books are becoming mainstream; tablet computers are the way people are beginning to read. Last year, Amazon for the first time sold more e-books than they sold printed books. So we're talking about a different kind of world. However, have you read your licence when you buy an e-book, and the restrictions on it? Why is it becoming unfair to own a book when you buy it? What happened to the principle that “you buy it, you get it”? Now, you buy your e-book and they say yes, you can read it in Australia, but don't highlight on it, you can't annotate on it, and it's illegal to show it to your friends. There are so many restrictions on them that it's becoming impossible for us to use them in an online learning context. This is what is driving us as a university to open education resources.
Whereas you talk about losing money from fair dealing, we're saying no, you're not; it's going to be the same. The publishers are not going to lose money from fair dealing; they're going to lose money because they put in restrictions and have digital rights technological protection measures to make them unusable in an online learning context. This will force us to go more and more to open education resources, and we're doing that now. The State of Washington is going that way. The whole state is going to open education resources. California is moving in that direction. And they're doing it because of the locks. They can't function using the new tablet computers and e-books and everything, with the proprietary restrictions that are on them.
If you want to support the publishing industry, beware of unintended consequences. There's a big unintended consequence here. If you put the locks on, you're going to lose money, because we can't use them in a learning environment.
In online learning, we have to compare texts online. We cannot live with a licence and with protection measures that control everything we do in infinite detail. We need them to be open and flexible so that we can use them in a variety of different ways. We want to be able to use e-books in a 21st-century context with our students. And digital locks should not prevent legal uses that include fair dealing.
You say this is a balanced law. No, it's not. There's no fair dealing in this law. If somebody puts on a digital lock and I can't break it, I can't access my fair dealing rights, my legal fair dealing rights. So don't say it's balanced. It isn't balanced. But it's very easy to make it balanced--just say “for any illegal purpose”. That's all you have to do.
It's been argued that these restrictions to the publishing industry--