Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here today.
As you mentioned, my name is Dave Westwood. I'm the current president of the Dalhousie Faculty Association, and we represent 950-plus academic staff, librarians, and professional counsellors at Dalhousie University. We are the largest research-intensive university in the Atlantic region.
Our interests—what I'll be speaking about today—align, of course, in the academic realm with two fundamental aspects of our mission, which are teaching and research, primarily guided by the notion of the public good. Our interests are in the area of accessing content and producing and protecting content. Both are a key part of our role at the university.
We support a balance of rights for users and producers primarily for those reasons. We respect the need for content to guide our scholarly work, and we also appreciate the need to access materials for the purpose of educating the leaders of tomorrow. We support a continuation of the 2012 Copyright Modernization Act.
Our specific interests would be in preserving the fair dealing exception that is in effect today. We believe it is necessary and fundamental for the education of Canadians, and we believe it strikes a good balance between the needs of those who access content and content producers.
Many of my speaking notes are in alignment with the Canadian Association of University Teachers, CAUT. I believe they have already spoken or will probably be speaking at a panel in the future, and so many of our points are simply a reflection of their interests.
We believe that aboriginal peoples' rights need to be recognized and reconciled with current copyright legislation. Of course, aboriginal ways of knowing differ in many ways from European ways of knowing, and the notion of ownership and sharing are quite different between the dominant culture and aboriginal culture. We believe that needs to be reflected in whatever version of the legislation comes next.
We believe digital locks have a place, of course, but we believe that not indicating the conditions under which those locks need to be and should be broken puts the quality of education at risk. We think to enforce or to take advantage of the fair dealing rights, sometimes digital locks need to be circumvented, and we believe there should be better indication of the conditions under which that is appropriate.
We believe in maintaining copyright term of life plus 50 years. It strikes a good balance again between the rights of the families of those who produce content and the need for and the benefit of accessing that content for the purpose of education and keeping education current with issues that are of recent interest.
We don't believe that crown copyright serves a good educational purpose in the sense that many of those works were funded already by the public purse and paying for them again doesn't, in our view, seem to make much sense.
As I said, our primary belief is in the emphasis of balancing rights, and we believe the current Copyright Act serves those purposes quite well.
I'd like to raise a number of additional issues that go beyond those that CAUT would be speaking about. One is to recognize the new challenges posed by the digital era. One issue in particular that comes up is how taking advantage of fair dealing rights in the performance of a research piece, like a dissertation, can become complicated when the dissertation is released online as a part of policy because then it becomes available to others who may not be using it for fair dealing. We believe that's an important issue that needs to be given some thought.
Of course the issue of multilateral trade partnerships is front and centre in extending the lifetime of copyright, and those are complex issues. Unfortunately, I don't have much to say about that today, but just recognizing that will be a challenge, of course, for copyright legislation.
The challenges of open access models are very real. These are exciting times for us in academia with the ability to pay up front, take copyright, and make the work freely available to everybody, but of course challenges are posed by that as well. I believe it's time to take that into consideration in copyright legislation.
One issue of particular concern for many of our members is online crowd-sourced platforms where things like our own lecture notes, test materials, and recordings of our lectures are now being released online without our permission. You can see that we have a vested interest, as well, in protecting our own works from inappropriate use.
Issues around academic fraud are also a part of the copyright equation, to some extent. Things where people are paying others to author works that will be submitted for course credit overlap in the area of academic integrity and copyright, and I believe some of those issues may be of interest to your panel.
Thank you.