Fair Dealing Week for 2023 may have come to an end, but my series on Canadian copyright, fair dealing, and education continues. This week’s Law Bytes podcast features Western librarian Stephen Spong on fair dealing and prior posts in the series endeavoured to set the record straight and discussed site licensing, transactional licensing, and the disappearance of course packs. Today’s post discusses the growth of open textbooks, which has flourished in recent years. That has saved students millions of dollars, provided faculty with more flexible, adaptable materials, and eliminated the need for either additional licences or a fair dealing analysis.
Post Tagged with: "copyright"
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 157: Stephen Spong on the “Goblin Mode Gaslighting” of Canadian Copyright and Fair Dealing
Last week was Fair Dealing Week, a chance for a wide range of Canadians – educators, students, librarians, archivists, and creators – to celebrate the important role that fair dealing plays in facilitating both fair access and fair compensation to copyrighted works. I ran a series of posts on Canadian education, fair dealing and copyright that will continue into the coming week. This week’s Law Bytes podcast episode is part of that series as I’m joined by Stephen Spong, the director of the John and Dotsa Bitove law library and copyright officer at Western University. Spong used fair dealing week to write a piece that appeared in multiple press venues to lament what he termed “goblin mode gaslighting on copyright” and he joins me on the podcast to talk about fair dealing in practice, the ongoing policy debate, and the meaning of goblin mode gaslighting.
Canadian Copyright, Fair Dealing and Education, Part Four: The Disappearance of Course Packs
Canadian copyright lobby groups effort to persuade the government to restrict fair dealing has often focused on a particular use case: the course pack. For many years, course packs were used by university and college professors to pull together a customized collection of reading materials for their courses. The course packs were copied and typically sold as an alternative to course textbooks. Copyright lobby groups and their supporters have long claimed that the practice relies on fair dealing and that universities are profiting from copying without compensation. My Fair Dealing Week series on Canadian copyright, fair dealing, and education (Setting the Record Straight, The Massive Shift to Electronic Licensing, Millions Spent on Transactional Licences Demonstrate Fair Dealing is No Free for All) continues with a look at what has actually happened with data demonstrating the printed course packs have all but disappeared from university campuses.
Canadian Copyright, Fair Dealing and Education, Part Three: Millions Spent on Transactional Licences Demonstrate Fair Dealing is No Free For All
Canadian copyright lobby groups have repeatedly tried to convince the government that the 2012 copyright reforms and Supreme Court fair dealing jurisprudence created a free-for-all in which education refuses to pay licence fees due to their reliance on fair dealing. The data from yesterday’s post on massive shift to site licences tells a different story, namely that Canadian educational institutions spend hundreds of millions annually on licences that provide both access works and the flexibility to use them in a myriad of ways. My Fair Dealing Week series on Canadian copyright, fair dealing and education (Setting the Record Straight) continues with another type of licence that has grown in importance in recent years: the pay-per-use or transactional licence. These licences, which grant access to, and use of, individual works, demonstrate that lobby group claims bear little relationship to reality. Indeed, if the lobby groups were right about unlimited uncompensated copying, why would education still spend millions a pay-per-use licences? They obviously wouldn’t, but since fair dealing represents a fair approach to both creators and users, education recognizes that fair dealing does not lead to the complete elimination of licensed copying.
Canadian Copyright, Fair Dealing and Education, Part Two: The Massive Shift to Electronic Licensing
Canadian copyright lobby groups have spent years falsely claiming that educational institutions refuse to pay for licences to compensate for the use of educational materials. This second post in my Fair Dealing Week series on Canadian copyright, fair dealing, and education focuses on this claim, which is a gross misrepresentation of the data (first post on Setting the Record Straight). The truth is that Canadian universities spend millions of dollars on licensing copyright materials. In fact, over the past decade, the emergence of site licenses that provide access to millions of works – books, journal articles, newspapers, and more – has led to huge increases in expenditures for access. Unlike copyright licences from copyright collectives such as Access Copyright, these digital licences provide both original access to works and the ability to use them in course materials. In the 1990s, a university would both purchase a book and pay for the right to copy a portion of it to distribute to students as course materials. Today, the university can use a single licence to gain access to the book and make it available as course material, handouts and for many other purposes since most digital licences facilitate access and permit multiple uses.
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