Faculty Members’ Reports of Copyright Difficulties

25 Oct 11 - The following summarizes the responses of 24 YUFA faculty members to the recent call for reports on copyright difficulties.

Faculties from which difficulties were reported include:

Education
Environmental Studies
Fine Arts
Graduate Studies
Health
LA&PS
Science & Engineering
Schulich

Faculty ranks of those reporting difficulties include Assistant, Associate, Full, Distinguished Research, and Emeritus.

The difficulties have been grouped into 4 categories:

1. Academic Freedom / Privacy

   1. rumours of students spying on faculty and classmates re: potential copyright infringement

   2. fear of persons other than faculty, TAs, and students enrolled in a course being enabled to enter a course website searching for possibly infringing items

   3. related fear of persons other than faculty being enabled to enter a faculty member’s website to search for possibly infringing items

   4. faculty prevented from providing students with copies of their own publications

2. Workload & Working Conditions

   1. lack of clarity at York’s copyright website re: new requirements for use of copyright material

   2. insufficient lead time for faculty to implement new requirements

   3. lack of notice concerning new requirements: faculty member placed course-kit order as usual by mid-Summer and was never notified that the copies would be late: as of 3 October, still had no commitment from Bookstore that items would even be available by mid-October

   4. inordinate delays in processing faculty permission requests e.g., request for permission placed with Bookstore 2 August; after repeated queries and promises, items not made available by Bookstore until 3 October: detailed email paper trail documents delays

   5. faculty now required to seek permission repeatedly as permission might not be granted from year to year

3. Pedagogy

   1. faculty have removed from reading lists all items not strictly ‘required’

   2. faculty have removed from reading lists all items requiring permission so that the reduced curricular material will be available to students in a reasonable amount of time

   3. faculty can no longer place readings on Reserve at the pace of a course’s progression (e.g., cases before solutions to cases): as a result, class time is needlessly expended on solutions rather than on subsequent topics

   4. faculty report that articles included in past course kits were denied permission this year

   5. students have directed anger concerning delays at faculty members

   6. insufficient numbers of copies have been made available by Bookstore (e.g., 120 copies for a class of 200)

   7. insufficient lead time for students to prepare for their midterm test and their proposals for the major semester project

   8. turn-around time for permission requests via the Library has been too long for readings to be incorporated into graduate and undergraduate seminar courses where their relevance has arisen during class discussion

   9. eBook licences often allow for only a very limited number of concurrent users

   10. readings previously accessible in hard copy via the Library are not yet  accessible via eResources

4. Expense

   1. faculty members’ departmental photocopying budgets have been exceeded in order to copy as soon as possible items for which permission has been granted

   2. faculty member had to pay a technician to dismantle and re-frame an existing course website as soon as possible

   3. because course kits were not available until after courses had begun, a faculty’s department had to photocopy 230+ copies of ca. 20-page syllabi that previously had been included in course kit and that comprise no copyright material (instead, grading scheme, policies and procedures, descriptions of assignments etc.); students will pay for this material a second time when the course kits are finally made available

   4. inordinate increase in the price of course kits, which is no longer printed on the kit: e.g., although containing fewer items than last year, a course kit’s price has increased from $57.00 to $87.00, i.e., by more than 50%; in another instance, from $54.00 to $99.00, i.e., almost an additional 100%, for a smaller group of readings

   5. concern about cost of legal representation in the event that a faculty member is sued for copyright infringement