Bill C-32 (40th Parliament, 3rd Session) Committee on Dec. 13th, 2010

[John Staple]

The study done in 2005-06 was a study of schools to see how much photocopying was actually done by teachers, for the purpose of setting the fee for Copyright Canada. The study was done by Access Copyright.

The study showed that teachers, on average, made 60 copies per year, per student--that's all, 60 copies--and that the teachers copied small sections of work.

That's what the study showed--

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

I don't understand.

[John Staple]

--and I don't see that changing.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

You're still requesting that the legislation be changed to include education under Bill C-32. Earlier I heard you refer to Internet documents for example. Copyright fees apply to Internet documents as well. You know, we have to teach youth that authors have rights and that intellectual property, whether it be in the shape of a written paper, a photocopy, or an Internet document or a projection on the wall, is subject to copyright fees. Intellectual property belongs to the content creator and it has to be respected and paid for.

[John Staple]

Precisely. One of the things we're hoping to be able to do out of this is to engender a greater respect for copyright with students, and to indicate clearly what it means to them.

What we're asking for in the Internet exemption is access to material that has been posted on the web that's already publicly available, that's freely available. We're asking to be able to use that freely in our work with students. But the copyright legislation makes it impossible for teachers and students to do that in certain ways without violating the act. We're saying let's make it clear how people can use this stuff without violating the act.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Yes, however there are already websites that indicate that their documents can be used. Are you not satisfied with that? Under Bill C-32, even the logo, that famous copyright C, will not be respected. It seems to me that if one respects copyright, then one must even respect that when the document in question is on the Internet, students should be directed to websites that contain documents that can be copied. They must not be taught that just because a document is on the Internet it's free and that intellectual property doesn't belong to anyone.

[John Staple]

No, I agree, and I understand that, but the use of the publicly available material is restricted by the act itself. There are certain uses of the material that teachers want to make that are violations of the Copyright Act, even though the stuff is freely and publicly available. That's what we want to have clarified.

If something is copyrighted and placed on a website, and there is instruction there that if you want this you need to pay for it, then we pay for it if we want it, and so do students. It's as simple as that.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Mr. Brown, I would like to hear your comments on the fact that if Bill C-32 were adopted as it stands, you would suffer an 85% loss in your income from Access Copyright.

[Douglas Arthur Brown]

Potentially it's up to 85%, but let's put that into real dollars.

As an individual creator, the average amount a writer got from Access Copyright this year was $350. That may not sound like a lot of money, but it's a lot of money for me. If you take away 85% of that, you're left with, what, $60? It's a big cut into my income.

Aside from that, over the past decade or so I've been invited by educators and by schools to come in and do workshops and to do reading. Obviously they think my work is good; I've probably taught 25,000 students. And I have arrived in classrooms where, in advance of going into the classroom, my book has been photocopied for every child in the room.

So with all due respect, it does happen.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Was your book photocopied in its entirety?

[Douglas Arthur Brown]

Yes.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

The woman beside you stated that that never happens.

[Mary-Lou Donnelly]

No, I never said that it never happens.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Fine.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

That's going to have to be it, Madame Lavallée.

We'll move to Mr. Angus for seven minutes.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you.

It's great to have the two points of view here, because the issue of fair dealing is one that I think we're trying to certainly define.

Fair dealing was defined by the Supreme Court, in the CCH decision, that based it on six steps that had to be met. The Copyright Board adjudicated their last tariff based on CCH and arrived at a fee that was to be paid. Now the ministers of education have challenged that all the way to the Supreme Court.

Do you support that challenge to the fair dealing tariff that was put in place by the Copyright Board?

[John Staple]

I think what the school boards are challenging is the element that does not allow teachers to make multiple copies for class. I think that's what they're challenging. We're not a part of that process.

What we're saying here is that it makes sense to us; it makes sense in the teaching situation to have a copy per child. So if you're going to make education part of fair dealing, then understand the reality of the classroom and extend the fair dealing provision to the act of making multiple copies per student.

I'm not talking about making multiple copies of a full text per student. That's not fair. That's free, and fair dealing doesn't mean free dealing. If you need textbooks, you pay for them. You should not copy textbooks. That's not fair dealing.

That said, if I want a page from a textbook and that's classified as fair dealing, then the act should give me the leeway to say that I can copy 20 or 30 copies for students without asking them individually to go copy it themselves, which would be probably classified as okay.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

I was wanting to clarify whether or not the tariff they chose was fair, because this is something that we....

As legislators, we can create a law, but we don't have the expertise to adjudicate what is copied in the classroom or what is considered copyright. That is the purview of the Copyright Board. It's being challenged at the Supreme Court.

So is it a question of the right to make one copy per child, or is it the tariff that they assessed based on the fair dealing provisions of the Supreme Court decision that you think is unfair?

[John Staple]

My understanding is that they're not challenging the tariff itself. I think they're challenging the process of making multiple copies. That's my understanding. The tariff is set by the Copyright Board and on the basis of the information that it has available to it. There will always be a battle about that--

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Yes. I mean, that's how copyright works. Our job is to sort of lay out the ground rules and then let your various organizations fight it out and arrive at a decision.

Mr. Brown, have you looked at the tariff that was decided by the Copyright Board? I'm trying to get at where this 85% drop in royalties is going to come from if the Copyright Board has identified--

[Douglas Arthur Brown]

Well, that's what Access Copyright itself estimates, that potentially they could lose up to 85%. They gather 85% of their revenues--a lot of money--from educational services. The rest comes from government, etc.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

I'm just thinking in terms of the fact that the Copyright Board had assessed schools based on the fair dealing provisions. Do you have a sense of how much of your work would be taken out and then allowed...that you wouldn't be compensated for?

[Douglas Arthur Brown]

It's difficult to answer that.

Again, I'm listening to “one copy for each student”, and I'm just trying to put my head around that. I'm thinking that if there's a class of 35 students, each of them gets a copy of my book, and only one book is being paid for, I'm losing a lot of income.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

But you're saying “book”. They're saying....

[Douglas Arthur Brown]

Well, yes, but when you're talking about children's books, for example, if the book is only 20 or 24 pages, you can't give an elementary child two or three pages. What often happens is that the entire work is copied.