Hello. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak here today.
It is my pleasure to have supported UNB as well as I could because I have been the copyright officer there since 2009.
Today, I'd like to do my best in a minute and 20 seconds to dispel some of the myths around universities' cost-saving measures as the reason for us dropping our Access Copyright licence. We have done everything we can. We have gone from department to department offering our services in education, and we have interactive online tools, quizzes from our website, and procedural workflows that have integrated course reserves at the section level with our students' and instructors' access to information.
I'd also like to say that fair dealing isn't something we think is a black-and-white test that we're going to be able to throw a blanket licence onto. This is a conversation and a copyright culture that has evolved on campus over the last 10 years and we're quite proud and so are the instructors who are willing to work with us on this.
But I'd also like to say there is a practical end to why this is working, and it's the digital disruption. There are no instructors here, I hope, right now, but this might be recorded. They're a little bit lazy. They're not going to want to go to the photocopiers and make these scans. They're not photocopying materials and making them available to the students. The content is quickly available online. That is where they are going. We'll make it available for them. We've given them the opportunity to let us do it for them, and they take us up on it whenever they feel they have to, but the majority of access to information is quickly going to the online content. That's the digital wave that's happening right now, and for us to strangle it with restrictions to fair dealing is going to have unintended consequences that I don't think are worthwhile.
Thank you.