Good morning.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My name is Joshua Dickison. I'm a member of the Canadian Federation of Library Associations on the copyright committee, and a copyright officer at the University of New Brunswick. With me here today is Alexandra Kohn, also a member of the CFLA's copyright committee, and a copyright and digital collections librarian at McGill University.
We greatly appreciate this opportunity to meet with you today regarding Bill C-244.
The CFLA is the united, national voice of Canada's library community. We represent the interests of public, academic, school and special libraries, and all of those concerned about enhancing the quality of life for Canadians through access to knowledge and literacy.
The CFLA applauds the Government of Canada for the introduction of Bill C-244, and supports the right to repair. As noted in our brief, the CFLA believes that additional and critical modifications are required if the legislation of technological protection measures—TPMs—is to ultimately succeed in being both balanced and technologically neutral.
Libraries, archives and museums—LAMs—believe that all Canadians should be able to circumvent TPMs for all non-infringing purposes, including the right to repair products. The right to repair should be a user right in Canada. It is essential for preserving balance in the law.
TPMs prevent our communities from fulfilling our socially beneficial mandate to preserve and maintain access over time to our collections. Libraries and archives play an essential role, providing access to many objects and devices that control access to information, such as printers, scanners and digitization equipment, and enable innovators with our maker spaces, tool lending libraries and 3-D printers. Our collections increasingly include software-enabled products, devices and applications, such as e-books, datasets, video games, computers, Wi-Fi hot spots and more.
Without a right to repair, the ability of libraries and archives to provide access to services and collections is threatened. For example, some Canadian academic libraries purchased Espresso Book Machines. It is print-on-demand technology. These machines were over $100,000 apiece. As a result of licensing terms restricting repair to the physical equipment, many of these machines are now rendered useless and sold for parts because of prohibitive software licensing costs and the inability to fix or adapt software for continued use.
Archives need the right to repair software-enabled products, for example, as part of their preservation activities and, in some cases, to simply correctly identify their holding. U of T libraries lost access to 55 discs of purchased case study teaching material due to obsolete file formats and a lack of documentation from the proprietary software source.
Information professionals are concerned that once devices and software are rendered obsolete, are no longer supported or are deemed unprofitable by a vendor, irreplaceable knowledge will be lost or made inaccessible if repairs and modifications cannot be legally made to preserve this content and access.
Canadian TPM legislation goes beyond our international treaty obligations and has far-reaching and detrimental consequences for the preservation of our cultural expression. The current language distorts the intended balance of rights, increasingly stifles access and innovation and is at odds with the principles of technological neutrality. Libraries are stewards of the cultural record and teachers of copyright protection for creators and users. Denying users rights simply because of the medium creates a culture of copyright chill.
The CFLA and the entire library community understand and acknowledge the complexity of the issues related to the right to repair. We also welcome efforts to improve upon the interoperability exception in Bill C-294. We applaud the Government of Canada's attempt to find balance between the concerns of rights-holders and those of users as a key goal of continuing copyright reform.
The library community plays a vital role in providing Canadians access to all forms of material. That access to information is integral to ensuring that Canadians are regular contributors to the economic, social and cultural well-being of our communities.
We would like to thank you once again for this opportunity and we're happy to respond to any questions you might have.