When we were looking at the proposed amendments before they were passed into law, we raised the issue—particularly around the inclusion of education as a purpose for fair dealing—as being something that was lacking the good fences that make good neighbours.
We have no differences with the project of education in Canada. We support it. We think it is obviously a public good. We have been through it ourselves. We have kids that rely on it. We're not anti-education, but “education” is such a broad word, and it essentially replaced a similar phrase in the act, which was “private study”. Education thus opened the opportunity for systematized, broad-scale, high-volume copying that was intended to avoid payment for work that was being used beyond legal limits.
We saw the education sector—after committing to not abandon licences—abandon the licences and immediately substitute a policy into this very large grey zone that was created by the very broad word, the inclusion of “education”. The specific policy looked to us, curiously, exactly like the terms of the licences that were abandoned.
Nature abhors a vacuum. We can't go back and turn back the clock. I wish we had been there with a policy before the education sector was. That policy, pushed out broadly in post-secondary and in the K-to-12 world, essentially defined the practice as if it were defining law. This is the body, the Parliament of Canada, that makes law. I think “clarifying” means substituting policy, potentially, or adding words to the legislation that make it very clear that what is not intended is systematic, large-scale copying that seriously compromises the rights of the people who created the works.