I'm interested in proposed section 30.04 on the use of Internet materials. I've published a number of books, and I get paid by Access Copyright for some articles that were in textbooks. When I was in school, we only had textbooks, because how else would you get articles? But now a great deal of material is coming in from students. They're doing their own research. They're not photocopying, they're taking stuff off the Internet; they're just cutting and pasting and putting it right into Word. That's being used in the classroom.
I ran a magazine for seven years. We posted all our articles online for free, because to us it was loss leader. We sold subscriptions and people used it. We always used to get calls from teachers saying, “Can we use this in the classroom?”, and we'd say, “Yes, sure, go ahead”. I didn't know that we were on the cutting edge of a copyright debate. It was just business.
So now we're dealing with what used to be a closed market. We now have a very open market, where all materials are coming in. Wherever you look on the Internet, there's as much product for free as what people used to pay for.
Would you support the use of Internet materials if we maintained collective licensing in place?