Industry Committee on May 24th, 2018

[H. Mark Ramsankar]

I'll just echo Ms. Marshall's comments. The onset of the use of digital material has had a dramatic effect on the use of print material, in that sense. To try to draw a direct correlation between print material and the non-use of Access Copyright as opposed to the impact that the digital age has had isn't doing a service to the people who are using the materials, at this point.

[Cynthia Andrew]

I would like to add to that the fact that we cannot purchase transactional licensing from Access Copyright. I get numerous requests from school boards who want to copy more than what the fair dealing guidelines allow and want to know how to do it. My answer has to be that you approach the author, publisher, or copyright owner directly. If they say no, then you do not copy. Your choice is to get permission, and payment where it's required, and if you cannot get permission and payment where it's required, you do not use that material. You find other material.

Nine times out of 10, people have to find other material because they cannot acquire a transactional licence.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Bratina, you have five minutes.

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Thanks.

I'm going to try this out like Mr. Sheehan did. I married a teacher. Her brother was a teacher, and he married a teacher. Their two kids are teachers, and one married a teacher and one married an EA. I ran for federal politics so that for six months of the year I don't have to listen to teachers' conversations.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Also, my son has his M.A. in library science and he's now a Mountie in northern B.C., so I think we're....

The reason I mention this is that at all of those dinner-table conversations, I never heard this come up. The only thing I ever heard, really, was whether on a snow day you could play the movie Oliver! for the kids who showed up.

How pervasive.... Mr. Ramsankar, you held up the material that you have hanging.... You both have it. Is that how it's circulated among the teachers?

[H. Mark Ramsankar]

We work with our member organizations to see that the material is available. It is in schools. As I say, this material is hanging in the photocopy room, but we go beyond just the material that's contained here with the rules.

I cited an example. As I said, this is from March-April 2018, out of Newfoundland. The articles in here talk about the copyright issue, the use, and whether or not teachers are complying. To be honest with you, you're talking about your dinner conversations around the table that are about education, but teachers that I sit with don't sit around the dinner-table talking about copyright. What they talk about is how they are strategizing to work with student X or what happened in the classroom. Copyright comes up when you have parameters set around you to access material or to help children access material; that's when copyright comes up. The title of our booklet is right there, Copyright Matters! There is respect when you're talking about developing materials to use in your classrooms.

In fact, I will take it a step further. As I've said, I speak for K to 12. When we're teaching about ethical research and writing papers, it goes right back to simple things like plagiarism: giving people credit for what they have written and what they do and making sure they are cited correctly. As teachers, we need to model that.

Simply making the statement that a teacher would blanket-copy a hardcover or a piece of paper, disseminate that out on the one hand and then say, “oh, by the way, you have an ethical responsibility”, doesn't fit. That's why I say that most of the anecdotal examples of evidence are one-offs or are about people who have gone outside.

When cited about it, it's not automatic that an employer or a principal will take a punitive measure on an individual. It's a teachable moment. You talk about copyright and how it goes. You make the corrective measure and you move on. That is what we're talking about in terms of the use of materials in classrooms.

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

The digital topic is common at almost every conversation now, by the way.

Who monitors compliance, or how is it monitored?

[Cynthia Andrew]

First, the person who would monitor it would be the principal, because that is the person who is responsible for distributing. Once they get it from the board, it's their responsibility to distribute the material to their staff and to talk about it in a staff meeting. Every principal across Canada is asked to speak at a staff meeting about copyright at the beginning of every school year. That is the first step.

Every board is asked to have a staff member in their administrative office who is familiar with copyright, so that when principals have questions that go outside their original knowledge base, they have someone to turn to. There is someone at the board level.

If the question goes beyond the person at the board level, there's a list that's available.... I don't think it's actually in this book. No, it isn't. There's a website that was created by the people who worked to create these materials. There's a copyright decision tool on the website fairdealingdecisiontool.ca. I encourage all of you to take a look it. That particular website has on it all of these materials for instant download. It also contains a list of provincial contacts. If your question goes outside what you can copy under the guidelines and is more complicated than that, in there is a list of contacts at the provincial level for you to reach out to in order to get the answer to your question.

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

That's very helpful. Thanks very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Thank you very much.

We're going to go to Mr. Lloyd.

You have three minutes.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

The next line of questioning is for you again, Ms. Andrew.

My colleague Mr. Jowhari had some incorrect information. It wasn't 600 million pages for the K-12 sector. We actually have evidence from the Copyright Board's decision on February 19, 2016, that there were 380 million pages of published works from Access Copyright's repertoire copied each year, and that this was done by the K-12s from 2010 to 2015. The Copyright Board ruled in 2016 that out of those 380 million pages, 150 million pages were illegally copied by the K-12s.

[Cynthia Andrew]

The point is that those copies were compensable.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Yes, they needed to be compensated for them. Have the school boards paid compensation for those in the wake of the decision by the Copyright Board?

[Cynthia Andrew]

We have not, because Access Copyright does not offer us transactional licensing.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

The Copyright Board has made the decision that you copied 150 million pages without compensating, but you haven't compensated the board, so are you...?

[Cynthia Andrew]

If you look at the breakdown of what those pages are, those pages come largely from materials that are considered to be consumable documents, documents that were sold for one-time purposes.

What we did in response to that was to send out a prohibition to all of our school boards across Canada, through the ministries of education, through CSBA, and through the unions, that consumables are no longer allowed to be copied. They are illegal and therefore shall not be copied. There is a poster—

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

That's very important, and I think they would appreciate that and the authors would appreciate that, but what about the pages that were printed before that time? I know it's going forward, but has it been compensated for going back? Have you complied with the Copyright Board?

[Cynthia Andrew]

We paid a tariff going back.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

You paid the tariff going back previous to the 2016 decision?

[Cynthia Andrew]

We paid the tariff for 2010, 2011, and 2012.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

These numbers go from 2012 to 2015 as well, so you're not paying the tariffs for that period?

[Cynthia Andrew]

That is correct. We are not.

That data, by the way, was found in a survey that was conducted in our schools in 2006, so it's more than 10 years old. I would suggest to you that copying habits from that time to now are substantively different. The Copyright Board itself did say in that very same ruling that the data was outdated and beyond its useful purpose. I would suggest that copying from consumables would look very different if we conducted a survey today.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

I'm not familiar with consumables. Can you describe them briefly?

[Cynthia Andrew]

When you go to Costco, there can be something called “Math for Grade 2”. It's colourful and has pictures and you fill in the little blanks. It's intended for you to take home to your child to have them fill it in. Similar kinds of materials are created by publishers for educators. They're intended for one-time use. Those kinds of copies are not—