I'd like to thank the chair and committee members for inviting me and my colleagues to appear today on behalf of the University of Manitoba and for granting us this opportunity to take part in this first Copyright Act review process.
We acknowledge that we are on the lands of Anishnaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis nation. We respect the treaties that were made on these territories. We acknowledge the harms and mistakes of the past, and we dedicate ourselves to moving forward in partnership with indigenous communities and in a spirit of reconciliation and collaboration.
The University of Manitoba will be submitting a written brief. However, we would like to highlight a few areas in our submission today. These are that the university is a content creator; it also supports the Canadian creative economy by being a content user, and it supports maintaining the fair dealing exemption. The university's library acquisitions have increased; however, there has been a corresponding shift toward acquiring more digital content.
As well, the copyright revisions need to support reconciliation and the mandate of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.
The University of Manitoba is the largest university in the province, with a community of over 30,000 students and 9,000 faculty and staff. Our community members are both content creators and content users. As content creators we contribute significantly to the Manitoba creative economy through cultural productions, academic publications, and research projects. In 2017 over 3,000 publications included University of Manitoba affiliation.
In particular I'd like to point out that the University of Manitoba supports Canadian content, authors, and publishers through various initiatives, although sometimes through new acquisition models involving intermediaries. Also, our libraries have two long-standing programs for monograph acquisitions, focusing on Canadian literature and Canadian studies.
The University of Manitoba strongly supports maintaining education as a fair dealing purpose and stresses that this exemption is providing measured access to content for students and academics just as intended, as a reasonable complement to, not replacement for, purchased content. The perceived decline in profits attributed to the educational exemption may be more related to a change in our preference for licences and e-formats. Therefore, creators may see new revenue streams from these licences that reflect the dominant way in which we now acquire and make available scholarly content. Correlation does not necessarily equal causation.
Over the past decade, university members have increasingly expected digital access to materials, and our acquisition trends reflect this. In speaking with my colleagues prior to this presentation, I noted that all my 11-year-old son's textbooks are online. That's the expectation as students move through the system.
The majority of our library acquisition expenditures now go toward subscriptions to license electronic academic journals, but I should also point out we continue to purchase and license scholarly monographs, both in electronic and in print formats. For example, from 2012 to 2018, our overall acquisitions expenditures that went toward e-subscriptions increased from 49% to 73%. During the same time period, e-books increased from 14% of annual monograph purchases to 77%. Thus, we are paying less in transactional fees and individual print copy purchases but significantly more to publishers for licences.
Universities are not in a position to acknowledge how publishers are compensating creators under the digital licences we are increasingly purchasing, but we urge caution that the Copyright Act should not be revised in a way that may inequitably shift the impact of the digital disruption from the publishing industry to the education sector.
I would like to end by speaking about copyright as it relates to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. The NCTR is hosted at the University of Manitoba and is home to approximately five million documents relating to the history of Indian residential schools. As with most archives, we do not own the copyright or the majority of archival documents and images.
The Copyright Act serves as a barrier when NCTR is contacted for permission to use archival images for purposes that clearly support reconciliation. Only the original creator of the photograph can permit its reuse if a copyright exemption does not apply. Because of the history of Indian residential schools, the requirement for an individual, such as a survivor, to have to contact a creator for permission is a very real barrier to youth and reconciliation. We propose that fair dealing be expanded to include an exemption permitting the use of full historical, archival, and museum content for reconciliation purposes.
While the University of Manitoba believes that the Canadian Copyright Act has strong provisions that benefit both creators and content users, we urge growth in terms of how reconciliation is treated under the Copyright Act. We will be elaborating on these issues further in our forthcoming brief.
Thank you.