Carleton has decided not to sign a new agreement with licensing agency Access Copyright, opting instead to continue managing its copyright licensing processes independently.
“Access Copyright is a collective agency which represents authors and publishers, and licenses materials to institutions like universities,” said Paul Jones, policy and education officer at the Canadian Association of University Teachers.
Since Carleton opted out of Access Copyright’s 2010 proposal to increase the licensing tariff from $3 to $45 per student starting in 2011, the school has been managing its copyright processes independently, according to associate librarian Valerie Critchley.
“With all the licenses and material we get through open access now, we no longer needed that blanket tariff,” she said.
This spring, Access Copyright and the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) entered into a new model license agreement which would drop the cost per student to $26.
For that fee, the agreement would duplicate what Carleton has already been paying for under other licenses since its opt-out in 2010.
“The Access Copyright deal actually proposed to take away rights that exist to works,” said Graduate Students’ Association (GSA) president Kelly Black.
According to the GSA’s open letter, the Access Copyright agreement would “prohibit students and researchers from storing and cataloguing journal articles,” and charge them for copying or pasting hyperlinks, “a right already granted under copyright legislation.”
Students are permitted to photocopy, or electronically duplicate and send to others, much of the material that universities license directly from publishers, Jones said.
The new license agreement would charge for this, duplicating payment for existing rights, he said.
Universities would also be required to monitor the emails of students and faculty and report on whether they were emailing links to articles, Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) chairperson Adam Awad said.
The AUCC went ahead with the new agreement without waiting for the results of Bill C-11, the copyright reform which is currently in the final stages of passing legislation, Jones said.
“What C-11 did was add another category to fair dealing: education,” Jones said. “Suddenly there’s this new right to use stuff without permission or payment, when it’s fair.”
“Carleton was fairly astute in realizing much earlier not to function under the tariff,” said University of Ottawa librarian Leslie Weir.
For the University of Ottawa and many other post-secondary institutions, the decision to continue under the interim tariff in January, 2011 has meant choosing to sign the new license agreement with Access Copyright, or face retroactive payments back to January, 2011.
“For us that’s about $1.2 million,” Weir said.
Erin Finlay, manager of legal services at Access Copyright, said that the company believes it is extremely difficult for institutions to operate outside of the licensing agreement.
For Carleton, the decision to operate independently means professors will have more options when deciding how to distribute material to students and use it in class, Critchley said.
“We think Carleton made the right decision, and we’re very pleased that students won’t be paying for a regressive copyright agreement,” Black said.
