Good afternoon. Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before this committee. My name is Hugo Setzer. I am a publisher in Mexico City and currently vice-president of the International Publishers Association or IPA.
IPA is a federation of national, regional, and specialist publishers' associations, with 76 member organizations from 65 countries throughout the world. IPA has three Canadian members. We have the Association of Canadian Publishers, the Canadian Publishers' Council, and l'Association nationale des éditeurs de livres.
IPA has a special interest in educational publishing. Educational publishers are very good at producing and supplying quality textbooks and learning materials, and they develop a wide range of innovative new tools and content in digital, print, and blended formats. Education is a legitimate market for publishers, and the protection of their investment by copyright encourages and promotes investment in quality educational material.
Publishers are not in principle against exceptions. They have their place in a well-balanced ecosystem. For example, we fully support the Marrakesh Treaty. But when there are too many exceptions or when they are too broad, they undermine the very business model that produces high-quality educational content in the first place.
When considering educational exceptions, we think that legislators should consider broader policy objectives, notably to establish a sustainable local publishing ecosystem that supports a knowledge- and information-based economy.
Exceptions for specific, well-defined, and narrow educational purposes are part of the copyright landscape, and publishers accept that. Publishers' experience is that exceptions that are designed for a specific case, as contemplated by the Berne Convention's three-step test, work best, since all parties have a common understanding of how the exception works.
The so-called “fair dealing” exemption introduced into Canadian law in 2012, however, is much too broad. Nowhere in the industrialized world outside Canada is education in the generic sense a permitted purpose for an unremunerated fair dealing exemption, as shown by many studies.
Our concern at IPA is that Canada is now considered internationally an outlier, not only with its fair dealing exemption for education, but with its court-made law that equates fair dealing exemptions with so-called user rights, all of which has resulted in loss of income for Canadian publishers and others. Publishers report reduced or even complete withdrawal of investment in Canada's specific K-to-12 educational content.
In the IPA submission to other national copyright reviews in places all around the world, such as Australia, Ireland, Nigeria, Singapore, and South Africa, we have had to argue that Canada is a bad-case example of governments' interfering with copyright and undermining the local market. It is an unfortunate but direct consequence of the 2012 copyright law changes that Canada now sits with such countries as Venezuela, Kuwait, and China on the priority watch-list of the Special 301 Report of the United States Trade Representative.
Canada has obligations under the Berne Convention and TRIPS whereby its exceptions must pass muster under the three-step test. We are hearing arguments from noted scholars that the fair dealing for education exemption, as subsequently interpreted by the Supreme Court and by a number of educational institutions such as York University, does not need the three-step test.
A well-balanced educational publishing infrastructure includes collective licensing. We all know that copying exists, and finding a mechanism that remunerates creators and publishers fairly for income forgone when teachers and students copy material is unquestionably the best way of dealing with this activity. Students perform best when they have high-quality resources to work with. Collective licensing in the educational field is done at a very low cost per head.
Education is a strategic resource for all countries that want to be part of the knowledge-based economy of the future. Educational publishers and the authors they employ, many of whom are former teachers, are the professionals best placed to translate curricula into quality textbooks and learning materials. It is publishers who are keenly aware of the latest research into teaching and learning. It is publishers who will use all available and appropriate formats, and publishers' materials are specifically designed to stimulate academic success. Please help us to continue to invest in education.
Thank you very much.