Access Copyright's approach is three-pronged:
1. It claims that York's purported fair dealing guidelines authorise
and encourage copying that is not supported by the law, and that there is no
justification for York to operate outside the interim tariff (see its Statement
of Claim).
2. It has filed an interim elementary and secondary school education
tariff application with the Copyright Board of Canada. The application seeks an
effective enforcement mechanism against the ministries of education and Ontario
school boards for their stated intention to stop paying the royalties set by
the Copyright Board.
3. It has filed a proposed secondary tariff with the Copyright
Board of Canada for the period of 2014‐2017.
York is not the only university to have opted out and Access
Copyright claims to be monitoring all those that have. The University of
British Columbia, which felt that Access Copyright's costs were not justifiable,
has gone to the effort of opening its own copyright clearance office just to
ensure that it complies with copyright laws.
Access Copyright says
that these legal actions are a last resort and that it believes in "a
strong and vibrant culture of writing, publishing, reading, teaching and
learning in Canada and is exploring new ways to meet the needs of teachers and
students in this new digital learning environment."
It seems to this blogger however that this is another case of a
collecting society having difficulty adapting to the digital world, where per
page tariffs just don't work. Access Copyright alleges that York's
fair dealing guidelines are "arbitrary and unsupported" causing Michael
Geist, law professor at the University of Ottawa, to say:"To suggest that a modest fair dealing policy based on Supreme Court jurisprudence and legislative reforms is "arbitrary and unsupported" is more than just rhetoric masquerading as legal argument. It is a declaration of war against fair dealing."
1 comment:
The collecting societies are in a similar bind to that faced by the leadership of big unions in the mass production of cars , steel making and the like; their feather bed' deals with their employer groups were under written by the natural monopolies and tariffs on imports the manufactures enjoyed. Publishing as a natural monopoly with dominance over distribution as well as production has disintegrated, hence the need to try and use law to restore the good old days.
Post a Comment