Good evening.
My name's Matis Allali. I'm Secretary General of the FAÉCUM, the “Fédération des associations étudiantes du campus de l'Université de Montréal”. We represent 40,000 undergraduate and graduate students at the Université de Montréal.
You'll understand that I'm here to talk to you about the fair dealing exception for educational purposes. I will not go on at length about the reasons that exception must be maintained. I'll instead come back to the arguments that are often used in claiming that it must be removed.
We often hear that fair dealing for educational purposes reduced income for creators and that universities spend less on copyrighted content. Let me reassure you. This year, at the “Université de Montréal”, $3 million will be invested for the purchase of copyrighted materials, $500,000 more than last year. So, despite fair dealing for educational purposes, budgets for the purchase of copyrighted material are being increased. In the same sense, I would remind you that, in 2015, school manuals still represented the second largest category of monographs purchased in Canada.
That said, protecting the rights of content creators is an important issue. Their financial instability is important. However, the solution is not in the pockets of students. They are also facing financial instability. It's not in going through the pockets of people who are having trouble making ends meet that we'll correct the situation of people in the same situation. I think that we can reflect on this situation without removing the principle of fair dealing for educational purposes, and that we can do better.
In 2004, in its decision in CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada reaffirmed that the Copyright Act must create a balance between the rights of creators and the rights of users. That is exactly why fair dealing for educational purposes must be maintained. That exemption maintains the balance between the rights of creators and the rights of users.
The situation regarding creators' needs won't be resolved by going through the pockets of students.