Hi there. I'm going to start with a land acknowledgement because we're very near Ryerson. Toronto's in the Dish With One Spoon Territory. The Dish With One Spoon is a treaty between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee that bound them to share the territory and protect the land. Subsequent indigenous nations and peoples, Europeans and all newcomers, have been invited into this treaty in the spirit of peace, friendship and respect.
Thank you for giving Ryerson University time to speak to you today. I also appreciate all your work in this important statutory review process.
My name is Ann Ludbrook. I'm the copyright and scholarly engagement librarian at Ryerson University. I would also like to acknowledge my colleague, Julia Shin Doi, general counsel of Ryerson University, who is also attending.
At Ryerson we are committed to diversity, entrepreneurship, and innovation, and to ensuring that what our students learn in the classroom is enhanced by real-world knowledge and experience. As such, Ryerson provides an important voice in advocating for copyright laws that support innovation and research, scholarly work, and teaching within the higher education sector in Canada. Such a copyright law includes fair dealing, as well the ability for circumvention of technological protection measures and related technologies for non-infringing purposes.
The law should be forward-focused and flexible to enable Canadian innovation in artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and other non-commercial data analysis. We also endorse laws ensuring protection of indigenous knowledge.
Like all university libraries, Ryerson spends substantial amounts to access and purchase essential information resources for students and faculty. Changes to the publishing world mean that the vast majority of these scholarly resources are in digital form and this trend is continuing.
More available content, more content in digital form, as well as inflation from 3% to 7% per year all influence spending increases.
It is important to note that increasing digital content enables direct linking to purchased resources through secure learning management systems, and at Ryerson to our e-reserve system, further reducing the need for print course packs and other course handouts.
Through Ryerson's copyright management e-reserve system and other commissioned services we spend more than $150,000 annually in transactional commissions for copies that are not within our licensed resources or are beyond fair dealing. Some of these transactional licences are direct publisher transactions or brokered through the U.S. Copyright Clearance Center, and fees are returned to Access Copyright as Access Copyright does not currently permit direct transactional commissions—as far as Ryerson knows.
More than 80% to 90% of the content we make available to our students in e-reserve is covered by licences for digital materials, links to legally posted, publicly available materials and open-access content.
Ryerson has also put into place copyright management safeguards to help ensure copyright compliance at our institution. Ryerson has a fair-dealing guideline that places reasonable limits on the copying and use of copyright material. Ryerson also provides copyright education for instructors, staff, and other community members.
We are aware of the committee's specific interest in Canadian content, creators, and publishers. At Ryerson, the majority of what we both use and create for research and teaching purposes is scholarly material rather than literary or creative works. A relatively small scholarly publishing industry in Canada means that much of what we create and consume is published internationally. However, we do spend more than $200,000 per year specifically on Canadian collection materials, both print and electronic.
It should also be noted that open access, open education resources, and other models for freely sharing and accessing scholarly and educational materials are important and have continued to impact the traditional publishing industries over the last 10 years.
Ryerson strongly supports copyright laws that recognize both the rights of copyright owners and the rights of the users. We join with other higher educational sector stakeholders, including Universities Canada CAUT, and CARL, the library association, in supporting fair dealing for private study, education, and research.
We believe that the 2012 Copyright Modernization Act allows limited use of works for education, and it remains an important investment in the future of our country to foster education, innovation, and scholarship.