Hello and good evening. Thank you for being here with us today.
We were happy to arrange some very nice weather for you today. It's too bad you're stuck in here and can't enjoy it.
My name is Roger Gillis, and I'm a copyright librarian at Dalhousie University. I'm also an instructor in the school of information management, where I teach digital collections. That intersects with a lot of the issues that this committee is discussing, like open access and indigenous knowledge, among a number of other things as well.
I want to do away with the notion that the education sector is not paying for copies that they're making by illustrating a personal example. Back in the fall when I was preparing my course, I had a wide range of material that I wanted to incorporate and have students take value from. That included Creative Commons licensed material, open-access material, but it also included material that was under copyright and for which permissions had to be sought. This included taking a chapter from a book, and then for using additional chapters, paying for that copyright clearance and paying a rights holder, so going to the actual source and ensuring that we were pursuing the proper licences for that.
The notion that we're somehow cheating authors and not paying for rights.... I can tell you that there's a lot of activity going on in the post-secondary sector around education for faculty and some other more monitoring-type measures, such as the use of our learning and management systems and electronic reserves, where we go through with a fine-tooth comb and say that this doesn't fall under fair dealing, that we have a licence for this.
As you've been hearing from my library colleagues across the country, we do spend a lot of money on licence resources, and some of that is coming along with paying for the amounts above and beyond fair dealing that are being used in the post-secondary classrooms.
I just wanted to bring that to the attention of the committee today. Thank you very much for the work that you're doing. It doesn't go unnoticed.