The Copyright Board of Canada has issued an order in the tariff proceedings with Access Copyright that indicates its preliminary view is that it will not support the collective’s demand for a provision that would require deletion of digital copies made under a copying tariff where an institution stops relying […]
Post Tagged with: "access copyright"
Access Copyright Urges Copyright Board to Ignore Bill C-11’s Expansion of Fair Dealing
As I noted in a post yesterday, Access Copyright has filed its response to the Copyright Board of Canada’s series of questions about fair dealing and education in the tariff proceedings involving Canadian post-secondary institutions. Yesterday’s post focused on how Access Copyright has urged the Copyright Board to ignore the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling on the relevance of licences to a fair dealing analysis. Today’s post examines the collective’s response to the Copyright Board’s question on the effect of the fair dealing legislative change in Bill C-32/C-11. Access Copyright engages in revisionist history as it seeks to hide its extensive lobbying campaign that warned that the reforms would permit mass copying without compensation.
For two years during the debates over the bill, Access Copyright stood as the most vocal opponent of the expansion of the fair dealing purposes to include education. Given its frequent public comments and lobbying efforts on the bill, one would think its response to the Copyright Board, would be pretty straight-forward. For example, it created a copyright reform website – CopyrightGetitRight.ca – that warned:
the education exception will permit mass, industrial-scale copying (equivalent to millions of books every year) without compensation to the creators and publishers who invested their creativity, skill, money and effort to produce this content.
Access Copyright Urges Copyright Board to Ignore Supreme Court Ruling on Fair Dealing
Access Copyright has filed its response to the Copyright Board of Canada’s series of questions about fair dealing and education in the tariff proceedings involving Canadian post-secondary institutions. I have several posts planned about the 40 page response, which continues the copyright collective’s longstanding battle against fair dealing. This one focuses on Access Copyright’s astonishing effort to urge the Copyright Board to reject the Supreme Court of Canada’s clear ruling on the relevance of licensing within the context of fair dealing.
Access Copyright has frequently argued that the availability of a licence should trump fair dealing. For example, in the 2001 copyright consultation it stated:
As a rule, where collective licensing is in place there should be no exception or limitation to a right for which the holder has a legitimate interest. As defined in the Act, anytime that a licence to reproduce a work is available from a collective society within a reasonable time, for a reasonable price and with reasonable effort, it is commercially available.
Access Copyright reiterated its position in its 2003 intervention in the Law Society of Upper Canada v. CCH Canadian case. It argued:
Canadian Authors & Publishers: We Demand Education Talk To Us As Long As It Leads to New Payments
The Canadian Copyright Institute, an association of authors and publishers, has released a new paper that calls on the Canadian education community to stop relying on its current interpretation of fair dealing and instead negotiate a collective licence with Access Copyright. The paper was apparently published in the fall but is being released publicly now since Canadian education groups have refused to cave to Access Copyright’s demands.
The CCI document, which raises some of the same themes found in an Association of Canadian Publisher’s paper that distorts Canadian copyright law (thoroughly debunked by Howard Knopf), features at least three notable takeaways: the shift to threats of government lobbying, long overdue admissions that the value of the Access Copyright licence has declined, and emphasis on arguments that have been rejected by the courts and government. There are also three notable omissions: the fact that the overwhelming majority of copying in schools is conducted with publisher permission, the role of technological neutrality, and the relevance of other copyright exceptions. By the end of the document, the CCI and Access Copyright work to fabricate a new fair dealing test that is inconsistent with Supreme Court of Canada rulings as they call for dialogue so long as it leads to a new collective licence.
Copyright Board of Canada on Copying a Few Pages: It’s Insubstantial and Not Compensable
The Copyright Board of Canada has issued a series of questions to Access Copyright in the tariff proceedings involving Canadian post-secondary institutions. Once Canada universities and colleges quit the proceedings, the Board was left to play a more aggressive role in questioning Access Copyright’s claims. Its questions focus on several important issues (discussed further below), but perhaps most noteworthy is its preliminary conclusion on what constitutes insubstantial or de minimis copying.
In establishing the scope of copyright rights, the law refers to “the sole right to produce or reproduce the work or any substantial part thereof.” Since the rights only arise once the full work or a substantial part of it are used, anything less than that – ie. an insubstantial part – is not subject to the rights identified in the Copyright Act. While some rights holders have argued that the standard for a substantial is very low (the National Post recently argued in a case that “even the reproduction of a small number of words in a newspaper article can be an impermissible reproduction”), the Copyright Board says that its preliminary view is that “copying of a few pages or a small percentage from a book that is not a collection of short works, such as poems, is not substantial.” With respect to the tariff application, the Board says this excludes more than 2.5% of coursepack copying.
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