Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
My name is Teresa Workman and I'm here on behalf of the Association of Nova Scotia University Teachers, ANSUT for short.
We appreciate the effort you are making to hear from people all across Canada, and thank you for the invitation to appear today. I welcome you to Halifax.
ANSUT represents over 1,400 full-time faculty, librarians, and contract academic staff at eight universities across Nova Scotia. Our mission is to bring their voices forward in support of post-secondary education.
With respect to copyright, a big part of ANSUT members' jobs as teachers and librarians is to gather and share knowledge with students. Another part of our members' jobs is to write. In this capacity, university faculty collectively creates thousands of articles, books, manuals, and other written works each year. These two roles, providing access to the works of others, but also creating works ourselves, means that copyright is an always-present factor in our working lives, and one that must balance the interests of both users and creators of work.
This afternoon I wish to bring three issues to your attention in this regard. The first is fair dealing. As you know and have heard from other speakers, it provides a limited right to copy literary and artistic works without permission from, or payment to, the owner of the work. In a series of decisions dating back to 2004, the Supreme Court of Canada has repeatedly reaffirmed the central importance of fair dealing to the structure of the Copyright Act and ruled it be given a large and liberal interpretation. In 2012, the federal Parliament codified existing educational fair dealing jurisprudence and practice into the Copyright Act.
To ensure the success of the law, the education community has created guidelines to assist teachers, researchers, and students with its implementation. Within this framework, fair dealing is working, providing librarians and professors with an important additional tool to make learning resources available to students and each other for teaching and research.
As I'm sure you are aware, not everyone has been happy with fair dealing, and you have doubtless heard critiques of it. One of the critiques is that it has led to rampant free copying and a refusal to pay licence fees. This is incorrect. Fair dealing is just a small part of the way knowledge is exchanged in the post-secondary education environment, and most of the material subject to fair dealing has been produced within the academic community to start with, for example, journal articles. Moreover, with respect to money changing hands, the education community continues to pay as much as, or more than, it ever has to the private sector for licences and other purchases of content.
The Canadian Research Knowledge Network, CRKN, is one place a lot of money is going. CRKN is a partnership of Canadian universities that collectively licenses research and teaching resources for universities across Canada. Those licences alone cost $120 million last year. The total expenditure across Canada is upwards of $300 million each year.
To conclude on this point, fair dealing makes a small but important contribution to teaching, learning, and research, and it has not led to an overall drop in expenditures on content. Please ensure that it continues to benefit Canadians.
The second issue concerns circumventing digital locks for non-infringing purposes. Many content owners attach digital locks to their content to prevent illegal copying. The Copyright Act currently makes it illegal to circumvent these protections. The difficulty with prohibiting circumvention is that while digital locks can prevent illegal copying, they can also prevent the exercise of fundamental rights such as fair dealing, accessing work from the public domain, archival presentation, and library lending. Fortunately there is a simple solution to this problem: amend the Copyright Act to allow the use, manufacture, or importation of devices capable of circumventing digital locks in cases where the circumvention is carried out for non-infringing purposes.
The final issue I bring to you is copyright of indigenous work. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has called upon Canadians to engage with indigenous communities and be leaders in reconciliation. The review of the Copyright Act presents an opportunity to do this by recognizing the unique relationship between indigenous communities and the creative works they produce, and the conflict between western and indigenous notions of intellectual property. We support all efforts the committee can make, in consultation with first nations, Inuit, and Métis organizations, to advance, explore, and develop specific legal frameworks to protect the knowledge and culture of indigenous communities.
Thank you again for the invitation to appear today.