Canadian academics: get active in copyright reform!

First, these institutions should call on the federal government to reject the proposal and instead adopt a balanced copyright approach that encourages the use of the Internet in Canadian schools. One possibility would be the establishment of a limited educational user right to publicly available work on the Internet. In keeping with longstanding and widely accepted practices on the Internet, publicly available work would include materials that are not protected by passwords, encryption or other means, i.e., information the author would appear to want to make widely available.

Second, the education community should stop wasting millions of dollars each year by paying unnecessary copy licenses to copyright collectives such as Access Copyright. While copyright collectives claim that education institutions need licenses to compensate for faculty and student copying, many copying activities are permitted under Canadian copyright law without the need for payment. The Copyright Act contains an explicit user right for copying for research or private study purposes (surely the most common uses of works on university campuses). The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that this user right must be interpreted in a liberal fashion such that copying full articles may be lawful in certain circumstances.