Evidence of meeting #110 for Industry, Science and Technology in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was publishers.
4:15 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy
Thank you very much.
We're going to move to Joy Muller, from Colleges Ontario.
You have up to seven minutes, please.
4:15 p.m.
Joy Muller Chair, Copyright Interest Group, Heads of Libraries and Learning Resources, Colleges Ontario
Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, Mr. Vice-Chair, and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you this afternoon.
As you've heard, my name is Joy Muller. I'm associate director of Seneca College libraries here in Toronto, and manager of Seneca's copyright services. I'm here today representing the Colleges Ontario Heads of Libraries and Learning Resources.
Our college libraries' responsibilities include providing broad library collections, current technology and array of spaces, and library literacy instruction to support the various research and innovation endeavours within the academic programs and subjects offered at the 24 Ontario colleges.
Our colleges respect copyright and the importance of compliance with the Copyright Act, while we recognize that copyright law needs to balance the interests and the rights of both copyright and moral rights owners and users of copyright material.
Our libraries have created opportunities for consistent messaging across the Ontario college community on copyright compliance through a series of locally collaboratively created training modules, which are self-directed learning resources to help educate our faculty and staff. They're entitled “Copyright Literacy in Ontario Colleges”, and these modules won the 2014 Ontario College and University Library Association's special achievement award. Over 90% of English-language Ontario colleges utilize them as either mandatory or optional throughout their institutions.
Consistently since 2012, many of the Ontario college libraries have identified copyright responsibilities as part of at least one employee's job scope. These staff advise students, faculty, and employees on the use of copyrighted materials. In keeping with these best practice efforts by the Ontario college community to support copyright and the exceptions within the Copyright Act, our first recommendation of three is to allow sections 29, 29.1, and 29.2 of the Copyright Act, which are directed to fair dealing, to remain unchanged. That would allow college libraries to continue to offer support and enhancements to teaching and learning that have grown under this legislation.
A further recommendation submitted by Ontario college libraries is to urge upon the government that section 41 of the act be adjusted to permit circumvention of technological protection measures for all non-infringing purposes, in order to ensure that we are able to exercise our statutory rights under the law. The law should be clear that it is only illegal to circumvent digital locks for the purpose of copyright infringement. This change to section 41 would enhance our ability to serve our users.
While prior to 2012, our library collections were largely print based, it's important to note that according to Statistics Canada, Canadian book sales actually increased between 2014 to 2016, as noted by Denise Amyot who presented to this committee.
College students have been asking for more flexible 24-7 access to learning resources, and the ability to access these resources from multiple devices. Ontario colleges have increased our digital footprint as a result, by purchasing licences to more and more databases, and increasing our user licences within those databases.
These digital resources provide around-the-clock access that the students are seeking, as well as supporting the students who are studying remotely through distance education opportunities. As a specific example, my library system at Seneca College has moved, since 2012, to a collection which is 90% digital, approximately 15% of which is comprised of Canadian content. We have in fact tripled our digital collection in those years.
College library collections have also increasingly focused on providing our users with access to open access journals, open educational resources, Creative Commons licensed materials, and resources that are publicly available on the internet.
Since 2012, most Ontario college library collection budgets have increased, and last year collectively, the Ontario colleges' libraries collections budgets exceeded $8 million. Statistics Canada reports that since 2012, expenditures of print and electronic acquisitions for colleges and institutes have increased by 26%.
The Supreme Court of Canada has made it clear that fair dealing is a user's right and that it must be given a large and liberal interpretation. With the changes to the Copyright Act in 2012, we feel that Canada has achieved a balance. The act grants extensive economic and moral rights to creators, while granting limited exceptions to these rights for users, libraries, and cultural institutions.
In the digital environment that college education is increasingly adapting for both teaching and learning, our libraries are licensing much of the content that our faculty and students use. These contractual obligations often have clauses that restrict the use of materials and override the exceptions that the Copyright Act provides. The Copyright Act should prevent vendors from overriding and removing uses of materials by licence that the statutory rights in our act provide.
We would, therefore, like to request as our third and final recommendation that an amendment to the Copyright Act be considered that indicates clearly that no contract can take precedence over the exceptions within the act itself.
Thank you.
4:20 p.m.
Liberal
May 9th, 2018 / 4:20 p.m.
Ken Thompson Chair, Artists and Lawyers for the Advancement of Creativity
Good afternoon. My name is Ken Thompson and I'm here with my colleague Ms. Marian Hebb. I would like to thank the chair and the members of this committee for inviting us to appear on behalf of Artists and Lawyers for the Advancement of Creativity, ALAC.
ALAC is a not-for-profit corporation that for over 30 years has been helping artists, actors, musicians, dancers, writers, filmmakers, and other creative Canadians address legal problems. ALAC provides the Artists' Legal Advice Services, ALAS, which is a free legal clinic for creators wishing to understand their legal rights or obtain guidance on dealing with specific legal problems. ALAC also offers educational programs for creators to help them understand the laws that affect them.
The ALAS clinic is operated by practising arts and entertainment lawyers and intellectual property lawyers with the administrative assistance of volunteer students from the University of Toronto. Our lawyers donate their time to provide advice to those creators who may not be able to access expensive or more intimidating alternatives.
Twice each week, ALAS lawyers meet with Canadian creators from all artistic disciplines who experience the impact of copyright laws on their professional lives and who need to sign copyright-related agreements and contracts to pursue their professional endeavours.
Today, because of limited time, we would like to list a number of specific recommendations that would improve the situation of Canadian creators.
With respect to fair dealing for the purposes of education, we would ask that you revise or add regulations to the fair-dealing exception, which was brought into law under section 29 in 2012, for the purposes of education. Educational institutions have adopted their own arbitrary and overly broad guidelines on what they think they should be able to copy without permission from authors and their publishers.
Limit the scope of the user-generated content exemption. Give collective societies management of the right of users to create new works using an author's existing work or performance without permission, such as fan fiction or mash-ups of songs, if for non-commercial purposes. A song mash-up or an unauthorized sequel to a novel or film by someone else could scoop the value of the author's or performer's original. The user-generated content exemption was added to section 29.21 in 2012, and it should allow authors and performers to choose whether or not to authorize user-generated content for either non-commercial or commercial purposes, and if the latter, to receive payment.
Revise the parody and satire fair-dealing exemption. Add to parody or satire as purposes of fair dealing in section 29 to cover additional forms of pastiche, and include the creation of works, including artistic works that use excerpts or clips from other works without further legal risks. Artists encounter these issues in their work and have brought them to our clinic. An amendment here could make an existing work more accessible.
Extend the term of copyright for authors. The term of copyright for authors should be extended from 50 years to 70 years after the author's death to stay in line with legal developments elsewhere, including in the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Australia. Authors as well as owners of corporate businesses should be able to bequeath what they have worked to create to at least their children and grandchildren. This amendment requires a change to section 6.
With respect to musical performances in films and on television, an amendment should be added to the act to remunerate performers for their recorded musical performances fixed in films and other audiovisual works when they are broadcast and digitally communicated. This would require an amendment to the definition of “sound recording” in section 2.
Remove the broadcasters' exemption. Remove the $1.25-million exemption that subsidizes commercial broadcasters and deprives performers of remuneration. Repeal this special and transitional royalty rate in subsection 68.1(1).
With respect to statutory damages for non-commercial purposes, get rid of the caps and bars on statutory damages for infringement for non-commercial purposes that make the remedy in subsection 38.1(1)(b) potentially nothing more than a single licence fee for many non-commercial infringements by more than one infringer. Effective statutory damages are essential.
In conclusion, all of these items affect the incomes or financial interests of authors and performers and their ability to exert reasonable control of uses of their work. Several of them provide greater access for both professional and amateur artists to make reasonable use of works of others.
From our work at ALAS we know how difficult, often close to impossible, it is to earn a living working as a full-time professional artist. We thank the committee for the opportunity to share our experience and views for copyright reform. Ms. Marian Hebb and I will be pleased to answer your questions. Thank you.
4:25 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy
Thank you very much.
Finally, from Ryerson University, Ann Ludbrook. You have up to seven minutes, please.
4:25 p.m.
Ann Ludbrook Copyright and Scholarly Engagement Librarian, Ryerson University
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.
4:30 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy
Thank you very much.
We're going to jump right to Ms. Ng.
You have seven minutes.
4:30 p.m.
Liberal
Mary Ng Liberal Markham—Thornhill, ON
Thank you, everybody, for joining us today and for allowing us to hear your perspective on this important study that we're doing.
As we travel around, we've been hearing a lot of perspectives. We've certainly heard a respect overall for content creators. Yet, at the same time, we've heard there's a real issue with respect to authors and content creators, and the impact on their income.
Through this study we're going to try to learn as best we can and, hopefully, at the end of this do right by everyone, putting forward a set of recommendations, based on what we will learn over the many months.
Mr. Caron, you talked about the need for clarification of the education provision, the education exception. Can you talk to us about that? We've certainly heard the need for that from a few people now. What would that look like for you?
4:30 p.m.
President, Ontario Book Publishers Organization
You've heard from both panels today that there is this gap between the guidelines that are posted and that are promoted by the colleges and universities to the people who are doing the copying and what's actually happening. There is also the issue of the gap between what those guidelines are, and what publishers and content and copyright holders would agree those guidelines should be. These are the kinds of gaps that I think we need to bridge somehow.
4:35 p.m.
Liberal
Mary Ng Liberal Markham—Thornhill, ON
I'll pick up on that, because I was hearing about it today
We've heard from universities and from colleges that the content they are licensing for their students tends to be in the realm more of scholarly text and material and less of the literary material. We also heard that rather than paying through a tariff or to Access Copyright, they're acquiring more transactional licences that they're paying to authors directly. And we're hearing that the expenditures are there.
I draw this additional hypothesis. Could we say that at the post-secondary level for colleges and universities there's an issue, and then for your literary works, it's the K-to-12 system? I'm trying to understand that a little, based on what we've been hearing.
4:35 p.m.
Author, Canadian Society of Children's Authors, Illustrators and Performers
Ann said “reasonable limit”. I would like to know what that reasonable limit is. I feel that colleges or K to 12 have assumed it is 10%, whereas we feel it's the nature of the copying.
If you copy one page of my story, that's fine. But if you copy a whole poem on one page, you're copying someone's work and distributing it and you are using it in place of a textbook. It's the nature of the copying; it's not the reasonable limit, or whatever they feel because of that educational exemption.
4:35 p.m.
Liberal
4:35 p.m.
Chair, Copyright Interest Group, Heads of Libraries and Learning Resources, Colleges Ontario
Thank you.
In the case of the colleges, because of the money we are putting into our licensing of digital resources, when faculty are looking to create course materials, they are looking to our databases, where we have paid a licensing fee. As I noted, we are paying for more and more user licensing within the contracts with individual vendors. If a faculty needs to use a certain resource, the faculty can send the students to a persistent link. They aren't making those physical print copies as much as they are linking to our database. A student has to log in and be using it as an individual user.
Many times they can't use it for a whole class, because we don't have an unlimited user licence. But there are some vendors where we do have unlimited licences that we have paid for. We have paid up front in our contracts for access to the materials for our faculty and our students.
I will just mention that in the case of course packs, for example, many of us have third party printers that have licences with consortiums like Access Copyright. If a faculty wants a course pack put together and printed, they will be working with a third party printer that we do not engage with, and that third party printer has the appropriate consortium licensing arrangements.
4:35 p.m.
Copyright and Scholarly Engagement Librarian, Ryerson University
We have Access Copyright in the course pack section at Ryerson. We do our fair dealing within our e-reserve system, in our digital content. So we do actually still have a relationship with Access Copyright.
4:35 p.m.
Liberal
Mary Ng Liberal Markham—Thornhill, ON
In respect of going through a vendor, you said that 90% of your collections now are digital, 50% have increased in Canadian content, and you tripled the digital collection. Do you know if that increase in purchase is getting back to the Canadian creators?
4:35 p.m.
Chair, Copyright Interest Group, Heads of Libraries and Learning Resources, Colleges Ontario
We have no idea of that. We are engaging with the vendors specifically on the databases we want or the e-books, and we can only engage because many of our faculty are authors as well at Senecaand across the Ontario community colleges. We can only assume that vendors are being fair to their authors and their creators, but we have no way of knowing that individually.
4:35 p.m.
President, Ontario Book Publishers Organization
Yes, I can comment on that directly from our experience at ECW Press. I mentioned $102,000 this year, and 70% of that came through these digital database providers. Two years ago, they came to us—we predominately use EBSCO, one of the databases—and they said that because of the educational exemption they no longer needed to pay us for that content.
4:40 p.m.
Liberal
4:40 p.m.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
Thank you, everybody, for being here today.
Ms. Ludbrook, can you clarify what your relationship is with Access Copyright? I was under the impression you didn't have any—
4:40 p.m.
Copyright and Scholarly Engagement Librarian, Ryerson University
We don't have an Access Copyright model licence or a site licence agreement, but what we do is that our course packs are produced at an outside vendor covered by an Access Copyright licence. Then they're delivered to the bookstore and we sell them. The copyright is cleared through an outside vendor.
4:40 p.m.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
So the vendor has a relationship with Access Copyright and you purchase from that vendor, so indirectly—
4:40 p.m.
Copyright and Scholarly Engagement Librarian, Ryerson University
Yes, we purchase the content back. As well, we do have an e-reserve service at Ryerson.
4:40 p.m.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
What's the name of that vendor, just so we get it on record?
4:40 p.m.
Copyright and Scholarly Engagement Librarian, Ryerson University
I'm at the bookstore, but I think it's Gilmore in Ottawa, a printer. I'm not the bookstore manager, so....