Earlier this month, Jewish students at Wilfrid Laurier University returned to their residence after Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, to find that the mezuzahs affixed to their doors had been torn off and smashed. In the immediate aftermath, the campus Chabad rabbi joined the university’s dean of students to replace them, with Jewish and non-Jewish students gathering in support to send a unified response to the blatant antisemitism. My The Hub op-ed notes that the incident was yet another reminder of the escalation of harassment, discrimination, and vandalism targeting Jewish students and faculty on Canadian campuses. While repeated surveys and studies have left little doubt about the scale of the problem, not all universities have responded as decisively as Laurier. Indeed, too many have either ignored the issue or been reluctant to address it head-on.
Post Tagged with: "education"
Separating Fact From Fiction: The Reality of Canadian Copyright, Fair Dealing, and Education
This week, I had the honour of speaking at a packed event at the World Intellectual Property Organization titled How WIPO Can Contribute to Achieving the Right to Education. The panel featured speakers from around the world focusing on the copyright-related education issues. My talk, which used emerging data from the copyright review, focused on the reality of Canadian copyright, fair dealing, and education. A recording of my remarks embedded into my slide presentation is posted below in a YouTube video.
Canadian Copyright, Fair Dealing and Education, Part One: Making Sense of the Spending
The review of Canadian copyright law continues this week with the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology set to hear from Canadian ministers of education and the two leading copyright collectives, Access Copyright and Copibec. The committee review has now heard from dozens of witnesses, including a week-long cross-country tour. With the initial focus on copyright, education, and fair dealing, the MPs are grappling with three key trends since 2012: educational spending on licensing has increased, publisher profit margins has increased with increased sales of Canadian educational texts, and distributions from the Access Copyright licence have declined. This post, the first of four this week on copyright, fair dealing, and education, takes a closer look at the three trends and how they can be reconciled.
Fair Access: Striking the Right Balance on Education and Copyright
Academic Matters, a semi-annual publication that explores issues related to higher education, has just published a pair of essays on education, fair dealing, copyright, and collective licensing. Roanie Levy, the Executive Director of Access Copyright, wrote an essay in support of the role of her copyright collective. I wrote the other essay, arguing that emerging forms of access for copyrighted works lessens the value of the Access Copyright licence.
The full piece – Fair Access: Striking the Right Balance on Education and Copyright – can be found here. I conclude that:
any [copyright law] review must account for the millions being paid by educational institutions for access and the modest interpretations of fair dealing law in Canada, which have resulted in copying guidelines that are still more restrictive than those found in some other countries. Indeed, a fair review of the current system reveals that the problem facing Access Copyright is not that copies are not valued, but rather that in light of new forms of access and the evolution of the law, its licence is no longer valuable.
The Future of Education Is Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed
To borrow from Gibson, in recent weeks it has become increasingly clear that the future of education is here, though it is not evenly distributed. My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes the emerging model flips the current approach of expensive textbooks, closed research, and limited access to classroom-based learning on its head, instead featuring open course materials, open access to scholarly research, and Internet-based courses that can simultaneously accommodate thousands of students. The concern is that other countries are becoming first adopters, while Canada lags behind.
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