Canada's universities and colleges capitulate to copyright strong-arm tactics

Allison sez, "Michael Geist provides some commentary on yesterday's announcement by Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada and Access Copyright. His conclusion: 'For those that sign the model license, the new AUCC - Access Copyright deal is simply more of the same: AUCC and its institutions pass along copyright costs to students, Access Copyright gets millions in revenues despite ongoing questions about its repertoire (with thousands used to lobby against education copyright reforms and most of the money going to foreign collectives and publishers, not authors), and the potential for digitally-oriented changes within Canadian higher education heading back to the back burner.'"

Given the legal reforms and the increasing comfort with operating outside of Access Copyright, why did AUCC settle? I have no inside information, but my guess would focus on three factors. First, AUCC has never appeared comfortable with the copyright file. For years, its members paid millions to Access Copyright without giving it much thought. It was only after the collective sought a massive increase that it captured the attention of senior officials at Canadian universities, who began to question the value of the licence. AUCC, led on this issue by a former publisher association executive, has always seen copyright as a cost, not a cause. Once Toronto and Western struck deals with Access Copyright, the broad framework was established and an AUCC deal for a model for its remaining members was likely only a matter of time.

Second, a prolonged fight at the Copyright Board (and perhaps later at the Federal Court) is very expensive. Unlike the $26 per student tariff that will be borne by students in their tuition fees, the regulatory and litigation costs are more difficult to pass along directly to students. By striking a deal now, AUCC saves millions in fees, though students will ultimately bear the costs of its settlement.

Third, the short term advantage may have rested with AUCC, but there were some serious longer term risks. While many experts question the Access Copyright repertoire and the value of its licence, the Copyright Board has increasingly fashioned itself as a guardian of the collective. The Board's decision to issue an interim tariff without any reasoning hours before most people were heading into a holiday week was an embarrassment (the claims of urgency were proven wrong) and left little doubt that the Board was prepared to do almost anything to assist Access Copyright. The subsequent decisions, which included warnings about the difficulty of opting-out of Access Copyright, further entrenched the view that a hearing before the Board would not end well for AUCC, no matter the law nor the limited value of the Access Copyright repertoire.

This is further to my story from February, Canadian universities sign bone-stupid copyright deal with collecting society: emailing a link is the same as making a photocopy, faculty email to be surveilled .

Access Copyright and AUCC Strike a Deal: What It Means for Innovation in Education (Thanks, Allison!)

• [desperado]

  What has happened?  This is not the world my parents promised me.  

  Our laws are structured to aid the older, more settled, more powerful people maintain their position.

  But they die.

  Why do we legislate to protect the currently powerful at the expense of the inhabitants of tomorrow?

  • [msbpodcast]

    “But they die.”

    But they don’t die. 

    They’re corporations, and as Mittens Romney says in his campaign speeches: Corporations are people.

    The United States a fascist republic/oligarchy, and there’s nothing wrong with that as long as its properly organized. 

    Lets examine the three systems of economic organization:

    • Free Enterprise, where capital goods are owned by private owners and controlled by private owners.
    • Fascism, where capital goods are owned by private owners and controlled by the state.
    • Socialism, where capital goods are owned by the state and controlled by the state.

    These three systems are separate constructs from the four forms of government:

    • Anarchy (rule by no one,) (Examples of this are called Failed States)
    • Dictatorship or Monarchy (rule by one person,)
    • Oligarchy (rule by a few persons, like we currently have here,) We call it a Republic, a Constitutional Monarchy, a Confederation or a Federation.
    • Democracy (rule by the majority, aka “tyranny of the masses”) We call this doing things by Plebiscite. It quickly becomes unwieldy unless you have an intelligent and educated populace (not on this planet.)

    None of these socio-economic systems are mutually exclusive in the larger context of a political systems.

    In fact, it is necessary to combine the three because there are features of each which complement and fill in the blind spots in each.

    A successful country is one where the systems are successfully blended.

    An unsuccessful country is one where there is an unnecessary bias towards one or another.

    The United States is no longer one where there is a balance and its is sliding into fiscal and moral bankruptcy.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    Why do we legislate to protect the currently powerful at the expense of the inhabitants of tomorrow?

    Because ‘we’ don’t legislate; ‘the currently powerful’ do all the legislating.

• [stephenl123]

  Can a university really sign a contract prohibiting it’s faculty from emailing otherwise legitimate links?  Or rather, is such a contract enforceable in Canada?  It seems like the sort of thing that would get thrown out if it reached a court in the US.  Also, it’s an insanely bad educational policy.  It’s probably sufficient to generated a measurable/demonstratable decline in educational quality.

• [msbpodcast]

  Canadian universities are becoming irrelevant in the context of education. Why should they care that they have passed a stupid law that will bankrupt the student body.

  The Far Eastern countries are graduating engineers; people who actually make things. We’re graduating lawyers and middle managers in a world that doesn’t need lawyers or middle managers.

  We are spending all of our capital for what they are actually producing.

  This is the largest transfer of capital in history.

• [Allison Muri]

  The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has issued a statement condemning the agreement. Some of the more egregious statements in the model license are:

  it defines copying to include “posting a link or hyperlink to a digital copy”;

  it agrees to pay Access Copyright to re-secure existing rights;

  it mandates the creation of survey instruments to monitor works used on campus  – this could include e-mail and storing, posting, displaying, uploading and linking to digital files;

  it prohibits the storage or indexing of copies of articles and other material;

  it prohibits transmitting or posting/uploading copies to, or storing them on, on any computer network other than one operated or controlled by the university (i.e., no storing copies of material on personal storage media, USB drives, cloud computing services, etc.) 

  … and more.

  CAUT also points out that this is terrible timing, given the upcoming changes to the Copyright Act with Bill C-11, and urges universities to reject the model license. 

  http://www.caut.ca/pages.asp?page=1079

• [Brad Bell]

  When I was in university you couldn’t photocopy a page in a book. You’d schlep from copy shop to copy shop trying to find someone who would fix you up with a copy, no questions asked. It was the speakeasy of it’s day. But that was before people had anti-piracy chips embedded in their heads at birth, which dampens the urge to photocopy books. And that’s how the publishing industry was saved!