Industry Committee on May 7th, 2018

[Mary Ng, Liberal, Markham—Thornhill, ON]

Thank you very much, everybody, for joining us today. We always hear good and learned testimony from everyone on all sides of this issue.

I'm going to pick up on that line of questioning but I want to start with President Campbell and the case in UNB. You had talked about how you're seeing an increased number of young people, students, who are creating start-ups and therefore contributing to the economy. At Dalhousie, you were talking about a greater need for datasets. If I extrapolate from that, it means that you have young people and students who in the course of their studies or their research or their entrepreneurship are taking from what they learn and they will create something else.

My question is for both institutions. Do you think that the regime we have now in the Copyright Act will suffice for that kind of creation?

[Donna Bourne-Tyson]

I have a few thoughts and then I'm going to involve my colleague from the Nova Scotia Community College here.

There's some user-generated content allowed now under fair dealing, but in the case of data mining, it's often not even the content as content that is required, necessarily. They just need massive amounts of data. So it's not really even using the content in a way...it's not copying the content for the sake of the content. They just want it to aggregate a lot of data, and then that is not really considered in the act yet. It's a new use that hasn't been really adequately described.

[Mary Ng, Liberal, Markham—Thornhill, ON]

Do you think we should be considering that, in some form?

[Donna Bourne-Tyson]

Yes, that was one of our last two recommendations in our brief about new technological needs, and data mining and text mining should be considered under fair dealing, we believe.

[Andrea Stewart, Board of Directors Liaison to the Copyright Committee and Director of Libraries and Educational Technology, Council of Atlantic University Libraries]

I think also from the perspective of technology, there's the digital lock situation. It has been brought up in other hearings as well. One piece that is particularly concerning is it's not permissible to break a digital lock to put closed captions, for instance, on content. From an accessibility requirement, this is challenging for our students and for us to be able to meet accommodations for students that reduce the barriers to education for them.

We have accessibility legislation in provinces now—Ontario, Manitoba, and Nova Scotia, most recently. That's going to be an essential piece for us, from a technology perspective, to take into account in the Copyright Act and to be flexible enough to deal with technology as it evolves and expands.

[Mary Ng, Liberal, Markham—Thornhill, ON]

For the publishers, do you have a perspective about this at all?

[Terrilee Bulger]

Do you mean data mining and whether it should be under fair dealing? We're against fair dealing. That would be true for that as well.

[Mary Ng, Liberal, Markham—Thornhill, ON]

Okay.

[Dr. H.E.A. (Eddy) Campbell]

From our perspective, the library has been in conversations with those areas of the university where entrepreneurship and innovation are most active by way of servicing them from a library point of view. I don't know that we run into issues of copyright there, Lesley. I know we have a vast array of information and a number of databases we believe would be very useful to people wishing to establish new companies, and a vast array of information that is relevant to that exercise.

[Lesley Balcom]

I think all I would add is we know that student demand for a need for data is increasing. If the committee is looking at preparing for the five years coming up, it is an opportunity to be addressing what we certainly see as information needs on the horizon.

[Mary Ng, Liberal, Markham—Thornhill, ON]

Thank you.

My second question has to do with acquisition of Canadian content produced by Canadian authors and creators. Has fair dealing changed your acquisition at the institutions and the colleges? Are we not buying as much? Are we not acquiring as much? Do you know?

[Lesley Balcom]

I think one of the things that's really important to be aware of is that most of the creators whose work we purchase are working within the academic context, so we're buying their works as part of our journal packages, as part of our e-book packages. Most of our creators—and many of them are our colleagues at the University of New Brunswick and across the region—are publishing in the journal, for example, that best suits their discipline.

We are acquiring their material, but we're acquiring it in a disciplinary context. We certainly continue to be committed to buying the works of Canadian publishers. I know when CRKN presented in Ottawa there were references to specific Canadian packages. We acquire those at UNB and other institutions within the region. We are active supporters of our regional and local publishers as libraries.

[Donna Bourne-Tyson]

To augment what Lesley said, in addition to what we purchase through the large licences at Dalhousie, for instance, we have the Canadian small press collection. We attempt to purchase everything that is published by a small press in Canada. We purchase two copies of everything to keep in perpetuity and make available. We have a collection of over 25,000 small press books now.

When you think about a university, Dalhousie or larger, we have 12 faculties. Certainly the faculties that do humanities education—English, history, law sometimes—would make use of small press materials, but there are other faculties like engineering, medicine, computer science where that's not the sort of educational material they require. Fair dealing does come into it because they are not using that type of Canadian content.

[Mary Ng, Liberal, Markham—Thornhill, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

We're going to move to Mr. Lloyd. You have five minutes, please.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, everyone, for coming today.

My first line of questioning will be for Ms. Bourne-Tyson at the libraries. I'm sure the publishers appreciate the work the libraries do, especially when they purchase copies. I think that's an essential part of the market.

In our current age, we're not back in the day when photocopiers were thousands of dollars, and only public institutions could afford them and monitor them. We have personal scanners, we have digital scanners, personal photocopiers, and we know these things are readily acceptable.

How are you able as an institution to regulate copyright infringement? For example, if I were to go to your library, and take a book out, and go to my own home, and scan a copy or photocopy something digitally or in hard copy, would you be able to prevent me from infringing on copyright?

[Donna Bourne-Tyson]

No. With print materials, if somebody were to take it out of the library and go to another location and scan it, we wouldn't know.

Our print circulation, for instance, is declining fairly rapidly. Most students really do want born-digital materials now, in very short snippets, too. Sometimes I think that in the future, fair dealing won't be an issue, because nobody wants more than 1% of anything.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Yes, I understand.

[Donna Bourne-Tyson]

They don't want to read anything longer than three paragraphs.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Also, not just talking about print, though, you have snipping tools on computers, where you're able to take a screen shot of digital content and you could mass produce entire digital works. Would you be able to regulate against that activity?

[Donna Bourne-Tyson]

What we do is educate to prevent that sort of material, and—

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

—which is important, I would agree. Sorry to cut you off. It's important to educate.

However, you agree that there is no way you can actually monitor and regulate copyright infringement. I guess my follow-up question is this. To ensure that authors and publishers are compensated for their work, even for your safety legally, wouldn't collective licensing be the best means to protect institutions such as yours from accusations of being conduits for copyright infringement, and also to compensate creators, to ensure that they're fairly compensated for their works?

[Donna Bourne-Tyson]

If we had any evidence of this sort of illegal photocopying going on, I think we'd be more concerned.

We're finding that, with the transactional licences where we pay for what we use, it's really a more equitable way for us to manage our money. Libraries never have enough money to purchase everything people want, and that's when we're deliberately going out and buying what people request. To pay a blanket licence for something people may or may not ever even look at, never mind copy, doesn't seem to be the best use of our funds.

I'd like to see if my colleague has something to say here. She's the copyright expert.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

One thing you mentioned is that you don't have the capacity to monitor whether people are infringing on copyright, so you can't really say, “Well, we don't know if this is happening; therefore, we shouldn't do anything about it.” If you can't monitor it, how can you say that this isn't happening? The evidence we're hearing from the publishers is that this is happening.

[Donna Bourne-Tyson]

That was one case in a primary school, not a university.

In favour of digital locks, this is why there are TPMs, to prevent some of that reproducing.