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

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

What if the language said, for example, “no books”? It would be pretty useless for me to be in class and have to share an article with three kids. But a book is obviously a book, even if it's a children's book. Would it clarify that if we said we're not copying books? It would be pretty useless to have a provision for articles if you can't actually have every kid read the article.

[Douglas Arthur Brown]

I can't speak to the articles, I can only speak to the books, because that's the business I'm in.

It's also important to remember here that when I say that “we” potentially could lose 85% of our income--with the amendments, if they go through--from the educational standpoint it amounts to about a 1% saving in their budgets. Again, I go back to balance: it's not balance when a creator's material is given away free.

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

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?

[Douglas Arthur Brown]

Again, that's a difficult question.

Can you just repeat...in terms of Internet use?

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

Right now, if any teacher tells their students to go on the Internet and do a search, they're going to find 10,000 articles, whereas we used to have to go to library and photocopy one article.

[Douglas Arthur Brown]

Yes, but you're not going to find my work.

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

No, not your book; I'm saying in general, for the education rights.

For example, I ran a magazine, and we posted 15 articles a month for free. We got calls from teachers saying, “We love this article and we want to use it in our history class. Can we use it?”

[Douglas Arthur Brown]

The articles that were posted, who wrote the articles? Were they paid?

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

Yes, we paid first-time use. All of our writers agreed to have it on the website.

[Douglas Arthur Brown]

Again, I can't speak to articles and I can't be asked to define what “education” is or what it isn't. I can only speak to books and the fact that, as it currently stands in terms of fair use for education, it is not balance: it is about stealing money from creators.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

That's going to have to be it, Mr. Angus.

We're going to move to Mr. Del Mastro for seven minutes.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I really feel it's necessary to try to correct the record a bit here. There's been a lot of questionable information provided here that I think is creating some confusion around the table.

I'm going to go first to the Teachers' Federation briefing here. First of all, it says:

The current Canadian Copyright Act states that it is not an infringement of copyright to “deal fairly” with a work that is protected by copyright for five listed purposes: research, private study, criticism, review, or news reporting. Adding education to this list seems a natural fit. Whether or not any particular use for education purposes is considered fair will require

—this is important—

an assessment using the six factors determined by the Supreme Court of Canada: the purpose of the dealing; the character; the amount; alternatives to the dealing; the nature of the work, and; the effect of the use on the work. In applying these factors, the Federal Court of Appeal has found that a teacher making copies for a class of students is not fair.

It seems, Mr. Brown, you're of the impression that the court ruling doesn't matter, that the inclusion of fair dealing for education means the fact that the Supreme Court has said that making copies is not fair isn't relevant.

Is that my understanding of what you're saying?

[Douglas Arthur Brown]

The courts can also consider other factors, as I mentioned in my presentation; you know, it's a little ambiguous there.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

First of all, I think we have to have an understanding at the committee, and certainly....

I understand that there may be some things posted on Wednesday that people may wish to consider about what fair dealing actually means--I'd encourage members to do some digging and understand what fair dealing really means--but now I have a question for Ms. Donnelly or Mr. Staple.

If the Supreme Court has indicated that copying for an entire classroom is not fair dealing, then does this bill threaten to wipe out the collective, the fees that the school boards are paying for copying right now? Are we going to see 85% of the revenues wiped out by this bill, in your opinion?

[John Staple]

No, I don't think so.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

No, I don't think so either.

[John Staple]

That process will continue.

From a general perspective, I can understand Mr. Brown's situation. This is the kind of thing that we struggle with as a teacher organization. I don't want to leave the impression that teachers are stealing from creators, because they are not doing that.

The fact that there has been a decline in textbook sales in this country is not because teachers are photocopying textbooks. It's because school boards and ministries have a finite set of resources for education, and they're trying to make it go as far as possible.

Instead of everybody getting a textbook, class books are bought, class sets, and everybody shares them. They pass them on to somebody else. That has reduced the number of textbooks purchased. The quality of textbooks is higher. They last longer because they're a standard set. There is a greater reliance on electronic information and digital information. There's a whole host of reasons why the textbook sales are slower, probably, over the last 20 years.

That said, maybe the number of texts is down, but the amount of money spent is still the same. It's increasing, as a matter of fact.

There's only so much of that pie. There are billions of dollars spent on instructional materials, books included, every year at the university level and at the K-to-12 level.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

Okay, thank you.

Do you see anything changing, moving forward? Can you imagine a time, moving forward, upon the passage of Bill C-32, with education as an included item under fair dealing, when school boards would encourage teachers to make copies of entire works and assume that this would be fair dealing?

[Mary-Lou Donnelly]

No, absolutely not. I can certainly speak from 30 years of experience in schools that it was never encouraged to copy an entire work, a whole book. As I said before, you wouldn't have the copy budget--the Xerox budget, as we used to call it--in the school. You wouldn't have the time to do it, either.

I can give you an example of how this would be used. Let's say a teacher has one copy of a children's book. Usually you would not have a whole class set of the same children's book; you would have a multiple array of books in the classroom for the children to read at different levels and such. So if the teacher was reading one of those books to the class, which very much still occurs in school, the teacher would, for example, read the book, show the nice, pretty pictures that go along with the book, and maybe copy one page out of that book and say, “Now we're going to work with this passage, and I want you to draw what you see here”, or something along that line.

Certainly I can absolutely understand where Mr. Brown is coming from. We are in no way encouraging teachers to copy entire books.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

I would be outraged by that as well. If it were my book, I'd be outraged by it.

[Mary-Lou Donnelly]

Absolutely.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

It's against the law now and it will be against the law once Bill C-32 is passed. I just want to make that clear.

I want to move on to some of the exciting things that I think Bill C-32 will do. I see Bill C-32 as allowing education to really roll into the classroom some of the latest technology. Can you talk a little about how teachers are using electronic boards and so forth, and how this can be brought in to really bring the educational experience for our students up to date?

[Mary-Lou Donnelly]

There's so much information out there on the Internet. Indeed, the Internet and computers are very much part of today's classrooms. At some schools and some school boards, children have their own laptops. They are using the Internet on a daily basis. They're learning how to search for information. They're learning how to make those connections.

That's what we want our children to do. They're learning to be lifelong learners. They're developing a passion with that learning, and that's what we want to have our students do.

So to limit them with copyright infringement laws would be very detrimental to their learning and to their increase in knowledge. We want our students finding as much information as they can and making those connections so that they will be able to make good, solid decisions on their own.

It's all very important. We want to have that open for teachers to be able to say this is what we can do, and not limit that.

[Dean Del Mastro, Conservative, Peterborough, ON]

Thank you.

I know that teachers have always played the part of very important role models for kids, because they work with them when they're quite young. I would think that following the laws as indicated by copyright--and, just by extension, some of the other things we've talked about--would obviously be something that would be of high priority for the education sector, correct?

[Mary-Lou Donnelly]

Yes.