The battle over competing visions of educational copyright licensing in Canada is coming to a conclusion. One on side, there is Access Copyright, which argues that a comprehensive collective licence is an essential part of an institutional copyright policy. On the other, are the Canadian education institutions, who believe that a more flexible, cost-effective alternative lies in relying on the combination of purchasing works, site licences, open access, fair dealing, and transactional licensing. Having first faced a proposal for a massive increase in Access Copyright licensing fees and later weeks of costly, unnecessary Copyright Board interrogatories, the educational institutions are clearly ready to break away from the Access Copyright comprehensive licence.

Access Copyright’s response has grown increasingly desperate. First it stopped offering transactional licences to educational institutions in the hope that those institutions would opt for the more expensive comprehensive licences instead. When the practice was publicly exposed, Access Copyright offered a laughable response that transactional licensing creates incentives to infringe. The Canadian educational institutions have filed a complaint with the Copyright Board in a case that will unfold over the summer.

Since the transactional licence gambit is likely to fail, Access Copyright has now released a note designed to scare the institutions away from relying on fair dealing. After months of issuing dire warnings that fair dealing would allow educational institutions to copy virtually everything without limits or compensation during the Bill C-32 debate (including claims that all educational licences were at risk), Access Copyright now ironically argues the opposite – that fair dealing is legally risky and should not be relied upon by educational institutions.

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