Thank you very much.
I certainly appreciate the opportunity to appear before this committee. I have with me today my colleague John Staple, who is the deputy general secretary of the Canadian Teachers' Federation. Together he and I will be addressing the questions, hopefully.
The federation is the national voice for teachers in Canada on education and related social issues. We represent upwards of 200,000 teachers through 16 provincial and territorial teacher organizations across the country.
Our brief to the committee we hope puts the views of Canadian teachers on elements of Bill C-32 clearly in perspective. As indicated in the introduction section, we have struggled with issues related to the balance that we believe needs to be struck between the rights of creators and the need of access by students and teachers to educational material.
Our own policy reflects the fact that we have been attempting to address that balance. We've been following attempts to amend the Copyright Act for many years. We and our partners in Canada's education community have been consistent in our approach on what is important for education over that time.
CTF supports Bill C-32 because it is a fair and balanced approach for education. Two key sections are of great importance to us. They are the education or Internet amendments, depending on your choice of words, which is proposed section 30.04, and the addition of education to the list of purposes for which fair dealing is available, proposed section 29.
The Internet amendment is important because the current copyright law is not clear about the extent to which teachers, students, and other educational users can legally engage in routine classroom activities such as downloading, saving, or sharing text, images, or videos that are publicly available on the Internet.
The amendment contained in proposed section 30.04 deals only with publicly available material. That is material posted on the Internet by the copyright owner without password protection or other technical restrictions on access or use. Most of this material is posted with the intention that it be copied and shared by members of the public. It is publicly available for anyone who wants to use it.
The problem is that current copyright law may not protect schools, teachers, and students when they are making routine educational uses of this publicly available material. Educational institutions and the teachers, students, and staff who work in them use the Internet in unique ways that may infringe copyright, even though many individual uses of the same material might be allowed under the Copyright Act.
Examples of the kind of educational use that is surrounded by legal uncertainty include making multiple copies of a work such as a photograph or an article found on the Internet for all students in a class; playing an online video for students in a classroom; and posting an item from the Internet on a class website. We welcome and support proposed section 30.04, and know that it will provide legal clarity about the use of publicly available Internet material for educational purposes.
The notion of adding additional purposes to the fair dealing provision has been discussed in the copyright reform process as a balanced method of providing access to works without harming copyright owners, because the dealing must meet a fairness test for the provision to apply. CTF supports the amendment to add education to the list, but believes, at the same time, that it does not go far enough. That is why our brief indicates strong support for the passage of the amendment adding education to the list of fair dealing purposes, and suggests a further amendment clarifying that making multiple copies for a class of students is fair dealing.
Two other issues referenced in our brief impact on the access to learning materials. They are the requirements to destroy course material 30 days after final examinations and the amendments respecting technological measures. We would support an amendment that deletes the requirement to destroy online course material 30 days after the final course evaluations, and we would support an amendment to proposed section 41 that would permit users to circumvent technological protection measures in situations where the use of the material would not be an infringement of copyright.
Thank you. We look forward to your questions.