The Film Studies Association of Canada is a national association with the goal of fostering and advancing the study of the history and art of film and related fields. It represents film and media scholars and educators in universities and colleges across the country, providing scholarly support, organising an annual meeting, publishing an academic journal (The Canadian Journal of Film Studies), and advocating on behalf of its members. It provided a detailed submission to the copyright consultation, with a particular focus on digital locks:

The rights of copyright holders are not universal – they are subject to specific exceptions in order to balance the rights of users – but the effect of copy protection technology and blanket anti-circumvention prohibitions is to enlarge the rights of owners while severely limiting legitimate use. As it stands, the rights of users within educational contexts are unduly constrained by copy protection systems, which prevent the legitimate production of clips, excerpts and stills, and the reorganisation of such material for presentation in classrooms and other scholarly settings.

FSAC calls for the explicit acknowledgement of the right of educators and students to produce copies of legitimately procured audio-visual materials for the purposes of study, analysis and critique, and the right to re-organise and re-present such material in educational and academic contexts and in scholarly publications. Such activity is already an integral element of film and media research and education, and is undertaken according to already existing academic protocols of quotation and acknowledgement. FSAC believes that new copyright legislation should not contain any elements comparable to the “anti-circumvention ” provisions of U.S. 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which would limit the right to make legitimate copies of copyrighted material within educational contexts, or which would force educators to illegally bypass copy protection systems in order to assert their legitimate rights to reproduce material for educational and scholarly purposes.

Previous Daily Digital Locks: Provincial Resource Centre for the Visually Impaired (PRCVI) BC, Canadian Consumer Initiative, Retail Council of Canada, Canadian Council of Archives, Canadian Teachers’ Federation, Canadian Federation of Students, Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Documentary Organization of Canada, Canadian Library Association, Council of Ministers of Education Canada, Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright, Canadian Association of Research Libraries, Canadian Historical Association, Canadian National Institute for the Blind, Canadian Bookseller Association, Canadian Home and School Federation