Industry Committee on May 9th, 2018

[Matt Jeneroux, Conservative, Edmonton Riverbend, AB]

Okay. You have a checklist, a do-it-yourself copyright checklist. I'm going to ask you to speak on behalf of other universities, but is that standard across the.... Did you guys create that yourselves?

[Ann Ludbrook]

We created that ourselves. I did that in consultation with Julia Shin Doi. We created a workflow for professors who didn't want to use our other options. Other options are to print course packs if they want it in print, through an Access Copyright vendor, or to use E-reserves, where we do the copyright checking.

[Matt Jeneroux, Conservative, Edmonton Riverbend, AB]

Who looks over that? Is that held in your department? There's a checklist, and I guess the instructor checks off the checklist, hands it in to you, and you are satisfied?

[Ann Ludbrook]

No, we actually have the E-reserves, so a large portion of our readings at Ryerson actually go through E-reserves, and they're copyright-checked. We're looking at that content.

The do-it-yourself checklist is for faculty who want to follow the rules of fair dealing and using licensed resources. Sometimes what will happen is that they won't know how to do the link, so they send me a syllabus and I do links directly for them, or we just direct them to use E-reserves instead, if they don't know. Some of the faculty do it themselves. They have the option to do that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Thank you.

We'll move to Mr. Sheehan for five minutes.

[Terry Sheehan, Liberal, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Thank you very much for your participation today. I'm from Sault Ste. Marie in northern Ontario. We have a lot of rural first nations in northern Ontario, as well as across this great nation.

One of the questions I'm going to be asking is for Sylvia. In particular, we're interested in the relationship between the Copyright Act and indigenous creators and their works. Do you have any sense from your indigenous members as to how the Copyright Act affects their work or any dealings?

[Sylvia McNicoll]

I'm sorry. I do not, specifically to the indigenous authors, but I would say that it probably at this point affects them more, only because we have the year of reconciliation and the schools are looking for more curriculum material. Our indigenous authors are going to schools more and visiting more.

[Terry Sheehan, Liberal, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

It is part of the Truth and Reconciliation process, but one of the issues that we've uncovered so far for the first nations community unto itself is that the Copyright Act usually deals with an individual or an individual creator, and the tariffs are paid to that person or individual and whatnot. For the indigenous communities, traditionally they look at a lot of things as a collective, as the particular first nation owning that symbol or that particular story that has been passed down through generations. It's really very difficult to apply the ownership to an individual. It's to the community itself. That's the way they view things.

That's one of our challenges with this Copyright Act. It really doesn't apply in a way that's meaningful for our indigenous people. We're trying to unravel that particular mystery. I don't know if anybody here at this particular table has any comments about indigenous ways or indigenous artists that they've been dealing with.

Ken.

[Ken Thompson]

All I would say is that the World Intellectual Property Organization has been studying the issue. It's called traditional knowledge, and the reason it creates somewhat of a legal issue is that traditional knowledge often isn't expressed in a way that can be copied. As you say, it's handed down from generation to generation, and the feeling is that it's owned by the community rather than by an individual. Obviously our act should address that at some point, but I think more importantly that we need an international treaty or understanding of how that would be dealt with. Unfortunately, it's not something that I think we can do on our own.

I would encourage the government to be very involved in traditional knowledge on an international scale.

[Terry Sheehan, Liberal, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

That's a good point. We haven't heard that one. That's good.

We have Sault College in Sault Ste. Marie, a very large college, and the libraries unto themselves that are there. It's sort of a technology type thing and you're seeing a lot of technological processes in place. Whether you want to talk about 3-D printing or...a lot of things are happening in the digital world and the technology world.

How are the colleges managing copyright as it relates to those new technologies that are out there?

[Joy Muller]

We're all working within the college environment, which contains learning management systems, and libraries are working within those learning management systems themselves. Even though the Ontario community college libraries may have varying systems.... Seneca doesn't, in fact, have the same one as in the Sault. I'm very good friends with the director of libraries in the Sault, Jason Bird, and while we have different systems, we're always working together to find commonalities that we can share through the heads of libraries and learning resources. In fact, Jason and I are in the Ontario Library Association Copyright User Group together because it goes even beyond the colleges. We try to encourage all the users to be compliant and use the fair dealing six factors. We're all trying to work from the same framework and the same guidelines, even though our budgets may vary, the sizes of our libraries may vary, and the sizes of our user communities would vary, as well. We still work very closely together to ensure that we have those technologies that enable our students to get the best education that they can.

[Terry Sheehan, Liberal, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Thank you very much. For the final two minutes of the day, we have Mr. Masse.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you again for your presentations.

Ms. McNicoll, you noted your concerns about your income, but what would your advice be to younger people, with regard to them trying to enter into a situation where they would want to use either artistic or literary creation, as in your particular situation, as a base for lifestyle and contributions?

[Sylvia McNicoll]

I've always said you have to cobble together a living. I have never said that you can write one poem and live off of it or one picture book or one novel, but now I say you really can't make a living. I have tried every different way. I've written about shot peening. I turn nothing down. I just find it's not possible anymore.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

I think even some of the testimony we heard in Halifax was about how people's incomes had been supplemented as part of a repertoire of either work or...but that they had basically dropped by between 50% and 70% or sometimes 90%.

[Sylvia McNicoll]

Yes, and in my case, it's 90%.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

It was partly those things.

I'm going to leave it at that, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

On that note, we have come to the end of another successful panel.

As you can see, the task before us is not an easy one. I'm going to reiterate what we said at the very beginning of this. Let's not assume what the outcome of this will be. We are asking hard questions of everybody, because we know everybody is concerned. Everybody has concerns. One way or the other, there are concerns with this, and the only way to really, truly understand this is to ask the questions that we're asking and then put all of that onto our analysts to figure it out and write a magnificent report, and then we can work on recommendations.

That being said, we are going to adjourn for the day and we will be back at 7:00 for the open-mike portion of this.

Thank you all very much.

The meeting is adjourned.