Universities in Canada are in a competitive business, but we're not competing with print publishers or the collective rights administrators over royalties. We're competing on an international level to produce the best research and create the best teaching environments. To do that, the best tools....
Frankly, print-based materials are being replaced with enhanced digital content, content that is more than just words on a page, content that is available to our students 24/7, and content that is directly licensed. There is no reprographic need with digital content that we've licensed directly. In our particular case with our e-reserve system, fully 54% of what we provide by our e-reserve system is already licensed by the library. Another 10% is available through open access content. Only 19% is done through the fair dealing analysis. Then we get transactional licences for the rest of them.
That's a fairly common breakdown for most of the universities out there. Really, it is not based on the fair dealing in the Copyright Modernization Act; it's based on the landmark decision in July 2012 wherein the Supreme Court of Canada recognized that teachers are “there to facilitate the students’ research and private study”. Teachers cannot “be characterized as having the completely separate purpose of 'instruction'”. As well, “the teacher’s purpose in providing copies [to students] is to enable the students to have the material they need for the purpose of studying”. The Supreme Court of Canada characterized teachers as sharing “a symbiotic purpose with the student/user” who is engaged in research and private study.
On this basis, the Supreme Court of Canada has decided that the fair dealing exception allows teachers to make copies of copyrighted works and distribute them to students as part of classroom instruction without a prior request from the student, subject to appropriate conditions, and we have created those appropriate conditions in our e-reserve system. More and more of our faculty are availing themselves of our e-reserve system based on this particular Supreme Court decision.
It's not fair dealing that is actually the problem here. The problem—and I have great sympathy for the authors in this as well—is that because of the digital disruption, we've shifted most of our purchasing into digital licences. For fiscal 2016-17, we spent $14 million on digital licences. Those digital licences, again, are not subject to an Access Copyright or reprographic licence after the fact.
We had print expenditures of $1.5 million in book monographs in 2016-17 and $1.2 million in serials. There are certain areas, such as design, where we still do print, but for most of the journals we get and for many, many of the books we get, we directly license them.