The copyright views of Canadian universities are typically represented by the AUCC, but several universities have made their own views known.  For example, Queen’s University provided its own submission to the 2009 national copyright consultation. It said the following about digital locks:

Protection of digital locks must not impede users’ rights.

Quoting from a book or a newspaper is established fair dealing, and it ought to follow that quoting from a digital file would constitute fair dealing too. If such fair dealing is prevented by digital locks, and those are given an extra level of legal protection, scholars and students will only be able to engage with an increasingly limited portion of the world around us. Courses will become removed from the cultural context of the times; critique and creativity will be stymied. Teachers, students, and researchers need to be permitted to show and recontextualize clips from digital media, or sequences of software code, just as they were in the analog age permitted to copy “fairly” for purposes of criticism, review, research, or private study. The Supreme Court stated in CCH v. LSUC (2004) that “the fair dealing exception is… an integral part of the Copyright Act… Any act falling within the fair dealing exception will not be an infringement of copyright. The fair dealing exception, like other exceptions in the Copyright Act, is a user’s right.” The prevention of fair dealing with digital locks would thus be not only a major threat to innovation and teaching, but a a major distortion of the Copyright Act as understood by our highest Court.

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