Industry Committee on May 7th, 2018

[Lesley Balcom, Dean, Librairies, University of New Brunswick]

My answer is very similar to Donna's, from Dalhousie, and similar to universities across the country. We're paying the vast majority of the millions of resources that we spend on library acquisitions to licensed electronic products, academic publishing. These are materials that are authored from within our institutions and across the world as well. They're international publishers. They are packages. The very significantly sized ones we buy, like others, through CRKN, and you heard from—

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Would you agree with Donna that it is where those five publishers are getting the majority of the funds associated with the copyright?

[Lesley Balcom]

That's where most of our money goes. At UNB we spend about half a million dollars on print resources in addition to our electronic licensed products.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Going back to Mr. Campbell, aside from the investment on the copyright and fair dealing, you also talked about the compliance and the support for the creative community. With the compliance, I think I understood, but I want to go back to the support for the creative community. What is it exactly that the universities are doing to support the creative communities?

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

At the University of New Brunswick, we believe we have an obligation to acquire materials that are created by authors of New Brunswick origin. We buy copies to maintain in our library. We are in some sense the home of the literary community in New Brunswick. We also celebrate the creative community by holding book readings and inviting authors from all across the country to read on our campuses. Those events at both of them, in Saint John and in Fredericton, are well attended. We often have a writer in residence associated with the creative writing program that we have.

Lesley, am I omitting any details?

[Lesley Balcom]

I'll add that we buy the papers of regional authors to add to our archives and special collections. At UNB we have the only collection of Atlantic Canadian children's literature.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

So that puts real money back into the pocket of the creators, I would say.

[Lesley Balcom]

Absolutely.

We are very much in support of our creators. I think an important point we'd like to be clear on is that we don't speak out of a lack of support for our regional creators; it's about the use of educational fair dealing to be the tool to do that. Many of the activities at our institution are in support of our creators. We would certainly encourage the government to engage in programs to provide additional support. Our experience is with universities, with the material that our constituency needs. Educational fair dealing is an important tool.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Mr. Chair, how much time do I have?

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

None. That was exactly seven minutes.

We're going to move on to Mr. Jeneroux.

You have seven minutes.

[Matt Jeneroux, Conservative, Edmonton Riverbend, AB]

Thank you, everybody, for being here. Some of you have travelled as well, so thank you for doing that.

I want to start with you, Ms. Bulger, if you don't mind.

You made a few comments in your presentation that I'd like to get to. I read some of the background information on Nimbus Publishing. You publish approximately 35 to 40 books a year, though that grew to 55 in 2017. That year you were named Canada's fastest-growing independent publisher by Publishers Weekly after an increase in revenue of 31% from 2015. You commented that diversification and distribution for other publishers were big parts of that.

Can you walk me through what that means and what that looks like? You made reference to some international markets and American markets. You're growing fast, but you're saying that the 2012 Copyright Modernization Act has hurt that. I want to get a better sense of what that might mean.

[Terrilee Bulger]

That's my company's experience though I was talking about publishing in general too with the stats earlier. We're growing fast mainly due to grants from the provincial government, which we didn't have access to before. Those allow us to do a lot more. As well as our distributed clients, we're able to do more as well. We do distribution for a lot of other publishers in Canada. As they grow, we grow too, because as they do more books, we do more books. If we take on new distributed clients, then our revenues grow as well.

Does that make sense?

[Matt Jeneroux, Conservative, Edmonton Riverbend, AB]

I think we're getting it.

Has the Government of Nova Scotia created new grants since 2012? Was that in response to the Copyright Modernization Act?

[Terrilee Bulger]

Yes, they did. That was two years ago now. That was a response to the focus on the creative economy. The publishing investment was very small here before, and it actually just brought the level of our investment up to what they offer in other provinces. It meant a good investment for us, because we had been publishing for 40 years, so we were significantly impacted by that.

[Matt Jeneroux, Conservative, Edmonton Riverbend, AB]

I think you also mentioned that you'd like educational institutions to further support your work. Is that potentially something else that you...kind of towards the end of your presentation?

[Terrilee Bulger]

Yes. For example, they mentioned they buy a copy of every children's book for the library, but that doesn't mean people can copy those books without paying collective licensing. They have a book in the library, it could be there forever and many people could have read or copied that book and they haven't paid to use that content.

Purchasing one book for a library doesn't result in a lot of income for the creators, so that's what the collective licensing—

[Matt Jeneroux, Conservative, Edmonton Riverbend, AB]

Fair dealing to you doesn't address that larger issue of students going to libraries and photocopying an entire book?

[Terrilee Bulger]

That's part of it, yes, for sure. Anybody can copy right now. They're not paying for the collective licensing, and people can copy whatever they want, so no money is going back to the creators.

[Matt Jeneroux, Conservative, Edmonton Riverbend, AB]

Do we have evidence that students are doing that?

[Terrilee Bulger]

I think it certainly was proven in the York University case with the Federal Court of Canada that, yes, that's definitely happening. We also hear a lot of hearsay from our authors. For example, an author might get invited into a classroom, as they were saying, to do a reading or a speaking engagement, and then they get there and the students are sitting there with a photocopy of their book. All the students are using and working with that book, but nobody has paid for the right—

[Matt Jeneroux, Conservative, Edmonton Riverbend, AB]

Even a 1,000-page book, they'd have a photocopy of the whole book?

[Terrilee Bulger]

In some cases, we've heard that, yes. One of my authors sent me an email in a panic; their whole book was up on a teacher's website asking the students to read the book.

They could have bought e-pubs from us. We do digital versions of all our books. There could have been some sort of licensing arrangement there. Instead, teachers are copying whole books, scanning them, giving them to—

[Matt Jeneroux, Conservative, Edmonton Riverbend, AB]

You'd have recourse through the courts, though, if that entire book is up on the website, would you not?

[Terrilee Bulger]

Yes, when you can find it. I think there's an attitude that it's educational, so we can use it.

[Matt Jeneroux, Conservative, Edmonton Riverbend, AB]

I only have a minute and a half left, so I will move to President Campbell.

Great to have you here, and thank you for representing the universities as well. Do you want to talk about the system that you guys have? You opted out of the reprographic licence agreement. You chose not to sign that agreement. What is that? You decided, as a number of universities have, to opt out of the access copyright.