Bill C-32 (40th Parliament, 3rd Session) Committee on March 24th, 2011

[Serge Cardin, Bloc, Sherbrooke, QC]

The Canadian Conference of the Arts provided us with a summary of the financial impact of Bill C-32 on artists and other rights holders. It amounted to $126 million. That may not seem like very much when compared with $1 billion, but it turns out that the $1 billion covers more than just copyright. The percentage is lower.

Potential losses in the education field under the new fair dealing rules are said to total $41.4 million. That is based only on what has already been paid and not on what could be paid under the rules in the current legislation, which might increase.

You tell us that there will be no losses for authors, creators and collective societies. But the committee has received this other information and estimates of losses. The figures are not terribly precise and may end up being a little more or a little less, but there is still an expected loss of $41.4 million from the fair dealing rules.

Do you maintain your position? Do you believe that there will be no changes in copyright?

[Ramona Jennex]

Yes, I'm saying with a firm commitment that there will be no loss of revenue for people who are in the creative economy. I feel that the claims you have brought forward are groundless. We've looked at this carefully. We're not asking for anything for free. We're asking for clarity. That is why we're here today.

[Serge Cardin, Bloc, Sherbrooke, QC]

But $1 billion is a lot of money! There might be a temptation to try... There are cutbacks everywhere. A minister must be tempted sometimes to say that $1 billion is a lot of money and ways must be found to reduce it.

If you had to find a way to reduce that amount, might it not be by changing a few of the provisions in the copyright act?

[Ramona Jennex]

We are not looking in any way to make savings. We are asking for clarity. At this point, teachers and students and professors are having difficulty knowing what they can and cannot do.

Society has changed, technology has changed, and the Copyright Act hasn't kept up with the new reality. So we're seeking clarity. There will be no loss of revenue. The claims that you brought forward are misconceptions. You talk about making efficient use of our money. We would definitely not in any way be affecting anyone who would be making a living at creating materials, creating art, creating music. That is not any part of this. What we're here for is to make sure there's clarity.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

Thank you.

We'll move to Mr. Del Mastro.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses today for appearing.

Minister, this has nothing to do with copyright, but I am the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage. How is the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 coming along in Halifax?

[Ramona Jennex]

Oh, I'm telling you, it is absolutely wonderful. There are many wonderful things happening at Pier 21, and the excitement around that being named a national museum is much appreciated. Ruth Goldbloom, bless her heart, is dancing.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

My grandparents arrived at Pier 21. I can't wait to visit it once it's completed. That's great news.

First of all, thank you very much for appearing today. It is very important.

On copyright, I think you are right to seek clarity. We've heard an awful lot of witnesses. Part of the challenge we have had is that there is, I suppose, a suspicion--perhaps that's the best way of putting it--a lack of trust among the creative groups, certainly among authors. We had an author appear last week who indicated that her feeling was that you would be taking them to court to eliminate revenues they are currently seeing. We've heard no such thing.

Have your school boards or your teachers or have you yourself ever indicated to anyone that you're not going to have to pay anyone any more for creative works? Have you heard any of the provincial ministers indicate that they feel that this education fair-dealing exemption means that they will not have to pay any more for copyrighted works?

[Ramona Jennex]

No, there has been no discussion about that at all. This has everything to do with seeking balance and making sure that it is clear at this time.

It's very difficult in the education system to operate without knowing. I know that we don't have much time left, but just on that point, I was in the Department of Education as a teacher for many years, and I could provide many examples myself of not knowing if I could use something in the classroom and of not having anyone who was able to answer that question.

I am going to ask the deputy to give an example of what's happening at the Department of Education in Nova Scotia around the lack of clarity.

[Rosalind Penfound]

Thank you, Minister.

I would comment that we not infrequently have people within the province asking us what the rules are, what they can do and what they cannot do. We don't have a clear answer for them.

What we are saying here today is that this bill is about allowing teachers and students to fairly use materials and works and to harness technology while respecting the rights of creators. It is not about preventing them from earning money from their creations or from controlling their use to the extent they may wish.

We want to have clear answers for the education sector.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

I've met with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of groups on copyright since 2008. I've always said that it's about defining the boundaries. Once people know what's legal and what's not legal, especially educational facilities and ministries and provincial governments and so forth, they're going to do what's legal. The overwhelming majority of Canadians follow the law. We know that. I appreciate that. I do think that clarity is important.

Minister, one of the things that excites me is where education is going and how technology, some of the new innovations we see, is really going to benefit education. One of the things about including education for fair dealing is that it allows some flexibility. It allows, for example, electronic boards and things that are on the Internet and so forth. Those should be incorporated as fair dealing in the classroom.

I foresee a time when perhaps textbooks aren't the medium through which we actually convey learning. It may well be through digital devices, such as iPads, or who knows. But I'm very excited, and I want to allow for that innovation to occur.

Is innovation with technology something your government supports and something you foresee happening in education?

[Ramona Jennex]

Absolutely. We're moving in that direction. It's mind-boggling to see how far we've come in such a short amount of time with regard to technology and what the classroom looks like. We have five-year-olds who come to school now who know more about computers than I did when I first started teaching. Mind you, I have taken many courses to bring myself up to speed.

It's part of who we are now in our society. Technology and the changes in technology are part of who we are, because what we're using today could be very much different five years from now, because, as you know, each and every year there is something new that comes on board. The education system has to be right at the cutting edge of that, because we need to make sure that our children are comfortable and that we're using it. If we don't use the technology properly in our schools and our universities, there is going to be a disconnect with the general society. We have to be responsible, therefore, with technology. We have to be right there on the cutting edge with anything new.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

Thank you. That will have to be the last word.

I'd like to thank our witnesses for coming today.

We will briefly suspend and come back in a few moments.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

All right, folks, we will call this meeting of the legislative committee on Bill C-32 back to order.

We have witnesses from three organizations. From Athabasca University we have Troy Tait and Rory McGreal; from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, Cathy Moore; and from the Canadian Association of Disability Service Providers in Post-Secondary Education, Karen Coffey.

We will start with Mr. McGreal from Athabasca University for five minutes.

[Dr. Rory McGreal, Associate Vice-President, Research, Athabasca University]

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--

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

I'm sorry, we're going to have to let you get into that a little more in the questioning.

We'll move along now to Cathy Moore.

[Cathy Moore, National Director, Consumer and Government Relations, Canadian National Institute for the Blind]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. We'd like to thank you for this opportunity to speak to you today.

I have to say that for a moment I was very pleased to think that Rory was perhaps going to become a colleague. As a member of the CNIB, I think we'd be honoured to have you.

I'm here today representing the CNIB, and specifically a service that we provide called the CNIB library. This is a library that has been in operation since 1918, since the inception of our organization. It's a library that provides library materials in accessible format or alternate format. The formats you would be the most familiar with would be Braille or audio. But audio, of course, these days can be audio streaming. It can be a CD, it can be a downloadable file, etc. So we've of course expanded.

We're one of the largest producers of alternate format material. For library purposes, we are the largest in Canada. But I certainly want to acknowledge my colleague on the other side and the educational resource centres in this country that are also producing alternate format for their students. It's absolutely essential.

In 2008 CNIB submitted three recommendations to the copyright reform committee. It's hard to believe it's now 2011. But we want to provide you with at least some encouragement that two out of the three recommendations, really, have been addressed. So I just want to briefly put a couple of provisos around that.

We had recommended to clarify the language of subsection 32(1). And I should mention that what is pertinent to CNIB in the production of alternate format for persons with perceptual difficulties is obviously subsection 32.1(1), around exemptions to copyright infringement. The language of subsection 32(1) has been clarified. We're very pleased with that. Thank you.

Our third recommendation was around digital locks and technical protection measures. And we are cautiously encouraged by the recommendations that have been made, in that there is now an acknowledged exemption or ability for the production for persons with perceptual disabilities, or on behalf of persons with perceptual disabilities. There is an acknowledgement that circumvention is required and permissible, and the tools in order to circumvent a TPM are permissible.

Now, that's good, and of course we're more pleased with that than to be prohibited by that, but it does not in any way address the issues of the broader community, the educational community. So those are good first steps, but ideally if we can work out a business model--and again, that's not the role of this committee--that would allow publishers to be circulating files that are in fact in an accessible format, in a format that doesn't require circumvention, it would dramatically increase our ability to produce alternate format books.

The second recommendation.... I just want to finish by saying that in the import and export clause, in subsection 32(1), it has been, again, an improvement. There is an acknowledgement that we need to bring in books. Why produce Harry Potter 19 times across the English-speaking world when one production and then exchange it back and forth is what we're looking for?

One of the pieces, though, right now that is very problematic for us is very small in comparison to some of the other issues. The requirement of the producing institution to actually establish the citizenship of the rights holder, although it seems very small, is actually very difficult for us to do. It would require more resources, more staff. It is difficult and time-consuming, and it really takes away from the very limited resources we have to do what we're doing, which is to produce and run a library. So if another organization, rather than the actual reproducer or reformatter of material, could be identified--for example, Access Copyright--as the organization needing to establish, and just hand over the information in terms of citizenship, whether this person is a Canadian citizen, a refugee, etc....

I think I will conclude there. Thank you again for the opportunity.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

Thank you very much.

We'll now move to Karen Coffey for five minutes.

[Karen Coffey, Member, Canadian Association of Disability Service Providers in Post-Secondary Education]

Good afternoon.

On behalf of the Canadian Association of Disability Service Providers in Post-Secondary Education, CADSPPE, we would like to thank the legislative committee for the invitation to appear today.

CADSPPE is a national group of professionals committed to the ongoing creation of accessible, equitable, and inclusive post-secondary learning environments for students with disabilities. The CADSPPE membership includes disability service providers from colleges, technical institutions, and universities as well as anglophone and francophone professionals.

Across Canada students with print disabilities, such as those who are blind or who have reading disabilities, have limited access to textbooks and course materials that are readily accessible to them. During the last decade there have been major advances in assistive educational technologies for people with disabilities, such as screen readers that can take a digital file and read it aloud to a student who cannot see the written word or is unable to comprehend the written word due to a severe reading disability.

This technology opened opportunities for students with perceptual disabilities, which makes up the single largest group of students with disabilities in Canada's colleges and universities. Students are now able to utilize sophisticated text-to-voice software programs that can convert digital text into formats that allow a student to listen to their textbooks and required course material.

Many provincial student loan programs already recognize the value of this technology to students with disabilities. As a result, students who qualify for student loans may qualify for grants to purchase the necessary software and hardware that are required to access the digital formats of their course material. However, the hardware and software does them little good if they can't access the digital materials required, such as an electronic version of a textbook.

Unlike their non-disabled peers, a student with a perceptual disability cannot simply go into their college bookstore and purchase an accessible copy of a required text. As a result, they become dependent on disability service providers to undergo the labour-intensive process of trying to convert a print copy of a textbook into a format that meets their needs. This process can take weeks, resulting in the student falling behind in their studies as they wait for textbooks in a format they can actually use.

In the case of text provided by publishers, students must rely on permission from the publishers to obtain text in alternate format. They also must rely on disability service providers to assist in obtaining those texts, as publishers, citing concerns about copyright, will not provide alternate format texts directly to students. Some publishers make excellent supports available and students receive the alternate format copies of information. In other cases, the alternate format may take weeks to reach the student, and some are not available at all.

When manual scanning is necessary, students must purchase a print textbook, cut the spine of the book to allow for scanning, and then physically scan the page to allow for the translation of a screen-reading program. The scanned information must then be edited for accuracy, as the electronic translation process is not always accurate. Across Canada disability service providers struggle to keep up with the many requests for scanning and editing text. Some post-secondary institutions, especially those in rural areas, do not have the staffing, the expertise, or the equipment to support students in scanning and editing all of their required readings.

The Government of Canada must insist that publishers make texts and materials readily available to students with disabilities. Ideally, students with disabilities would purchase their alternate format texts from the bookstore in the same manner other students purchase print textbooks. Furthermore, we urge the committee to include clear legal provisions that will require publishers and producers of print and non-print instruction materials sold and used in Canadian institutions to provide structured e-text files of those instruction materials to institutions upon request and in a timely manner. We see the legal thrust of the proposed law on copyright placing the burden of providing access to e-text files upon those responsible for creating and marketing the instruction materials in the first place.

Students with disabilities are not asking for a free ride when it comes to textbooks. They are willing to purchase their textbooks just like every other student. What they're asking for is the right to go into their local university or college bookstore and buy the textbooks that are accessible to them at the same time as their peers. Without this right, students with perceptual disabilities will continue to face barriers to what should be a fair and equitable Canadian education.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

All right, thank you very much.

We'll now move to questioning. We'll go to the Liberal Party, Mr. McTeague, for seven minutes.

[Dan McTeague, Liberal, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

I may not be using my seven minutes, but if I do I apologize in advance.

Mr. McGreal and witnesses, thank you very much for being here today. This may be our last round, but I'm sure we'll come back to this at some point, hopefully, after the election.

I'm wondering if I could get from you, Mr. Tait, or you, Mr. McGreal, your position here with respect to fair dealing. I just want to parse out what your position is, recognizing, of course, the unique nature of your university.

I understand you have worked with or at least shared some positions with the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, which was here just a couple of weeks ago. I'd just like to get a little bit more detail from you on that. I didn't really hear, from your comments, something about your position.

[Dr. Rory McGreal]

Our position follows from the AUCC position, and even CMEC. We like the amendments including education and satire and parody, and we like the idea that we'll be following the six factors named by the Supreme Court. We'd just like to be able to avail ourselves of it. But if somebody puts a lock on, there are no fair dealing rights. I don't know how we can even talk about fair dealing rights if you can put a lock on and take them all away from us. It doesn't make any sense.

[Dan McTeague, Liberal, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

Your concern, then, is about access more than money in this case, I take it.

[Dr. Rory McGreal]

Yes. Fair dealing, as it stands in this law, is very good. I think you've struck the right balance. As I said, there are just some very moderate improvements to the law that we're suggesting.