YUFA
External
CAUT Intellectual Property Conference Report
Ottawa, October 27-29, 2006
by Jay Rahn, York University
What Is To Be Done?
Whereas the reports by John Blazina, Ruthann Dyer, and Sharon Wang detail amply and eloquently information and insights disseminated at the CAUT conference, my main reason for attending and participating was to find out what faculty and librarians can do to improve their relationship with academic intellectual property. Accordingly, in what follows, I assume the other reports as a basis and rationale for the kinds of things that academics can do.
1. YUFA, through its Vice President External, ought to support a CAUT resolution to the effect that CAUT should attempt to intervene in the Copyright Board hearings that have been re-scheduled for June 2007. In particular, Access Copyright, which has a standard agreement with Canadian universities, including York, has requested a licensing fee of $12.00 annually for every elementary and secondary school student in Canadian schools.
Although this fee might seem of little importance to those who work in universities (except to the extent that faculty and librarians are taxpayers and parents), it should be emphasized that much of what is being ‘licensed’ and paid for is already available to students from kindergarten to graduate school for free according to the principle of ‘fair dealing as recently confirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada.
Moreover, one can reasonably anticipate that if such a high fee—more than twice what universities are currently charged on a per-student basis—would serve as a trigger to increase fees for post-secondary institutions. To contextualize this point, at York $12.00 per student annually would pay the salary and benefits of several full-time colleagues.
Most important, as speaker after speaker emphasized, the principle of ‘fair dealing’ was strenuously endorsed in the Law Society of Upper Canada judgment in the Supreme Court of Canada more than two years ago.
2. YUFA should also urge CAUT to break ranks in matters of intellectual property policy with the Council of Ministers of Education (CMEC) and the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC). These and similar organizations have subscribed to such inaccurate and outdated accounts of intellectual property law as ‘Copyright and You’ at York’s website and ‘Copyright Matters’ from CMEC. As of this writing, the webpage of York’s Secretariat still draws attention to ‘Copyright and You’ asthough it were an authoritative publication relevant to the highest activities of the University – right after the University’s Senate Handbook.
Treatments of Canadian IP like ‘Copyright and You’ are inaccurate and have been especially outdated and obsolete since the Law Society case of 2005. It is, for example, an ‘urban legend’ that one can only legitimately copy 10% of a book. The Law Society case stressed that fair dealing allows for an entire work to be copied legitimately.
Of great concern to YUFA members, CAUT has little reason to seek common cause with organizations that comprise the employers of faculty and librarians. On matters of intellectual property, the appropriate voice of Canadian professors and librarians consists of Canada’s professors and librarians themselves—not their employers, whose approach to IP appears to be shaped by fear of large licensing agencies like Access Copyright. Instead of disseminating the inept account of ‘Copyright and You’ and ‘Copyright Matters!’, CAUT and other organizations should be pointing faculty and librarians to more accurate and highly readable accounts like Copyright Law (Toronto: 2000) by former York Law professor David Vaver.
3. CAUT and other associations of faculty and librarians should also be advocating the following:
a. Open Source software – as an alternative to, and as a defence against, such corporate depredations as digital ‘rights’ management (DRM) technologies, e.g., spyware, which can prevent legitimate research, e.g., in computer science
b. Open Access scholarly periodicals – in response to the high cost and copyright constraints of corporate gatekeepers, who would prevent fair dealing, e.g., through the intimidating language at York’s electronic resources webpage
Other Reports from this Conference:
John Blazina's Report
Ruthann Dyer's Report
Dominique Scheffel-Dunand
Sharon Wang's Report