The book community is raising the tone a notch to ask the Trudeau government to revise the Copyright Act, which since 2012 has granted certain privileges to educational institutions when they use works for educational purposes. A breach that has generated since its adoption significant loss of income for authors and publishers.
To push Ottawa to tighten the Copyright Act, the National Association of Book Publishers (ANEL) staged a stunt Monday on Parliament Hill. Association members handed out blank books that said if nothing changes, this is what the industry will become.
“The 2012 amendments made it possible to reproduce parts of a work without paying compensation, or even asking for permission, if it is for educational purposes. This is the height of insult,” denounces the president of ANEL, Jean-François Bouchard.
Harper’s changes to the Copyright Act have resulted in valuable cost savings for schools. In some cases, they are no longer required to pay authors and publishers royalties even if passages of their works are used in the context of a course, for example.
Copibec, the organization that is the watchdog of copyright in Quebec, reports significant losses for the book industry. In 2018, university students were estimated to be paying on average almost half as much in royalties as five years earlier. At the primary and secondary levels, this drop reached 23% during the same period in La Belle Province.
“We would like the exceptions granted to the education sector to be withdrawn. At least we want the notion of education to be better defined. Because at the moment, anyone at home can reproduce works without paying royalties on the pretext that it is for educational purposes, “says Suzanne Aubry, president of the Union of writers and writers. of Quebec (UNEQ).
Better in Quebec, but…
In the rest of the country, the effects of the 2012 overhaul were even more felt. Access Copyright, the equivalent of Copibec in English Canada, suffered losses of 80% in the five years following the change in the law. Copibec has succeeded, unlike Access Copyright, in extracting piecemeal agreements with the various Quebec establishments so that royalties can continue to be paid. Obviously, however, the royalties are lower than before 2012.
In 2014, Université Laval wanted to withdraw from the license that bound it to Copibec. In particular, she wanted her teaching staff to be able to use “short extracts” of works without having to ask permission from the rights holders or by paying them compensation.
The community had protested against this decision, accusing Laval University of unilaterally defining the notion of “short extract”. A collective action followed, before Copibec and Laval University came to an agreement by mutual agreement in 2018.
“I don’t think that in Quebec there are new attempts to evade copyright. But it is not the law that obliges them to sit down with us, it is a moral posture that they have adopted. It is not said that it will not change one day. It remains a sword of Damocles above our head, ”underlines Mélissa Verreault, the president of Copibec.
Mme Verreault also wants the Trudeau government to revise the Copyright Act to better regulate the exceptions provided for the education sector. The president of Copibec says she met two weeks ago with the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, François-Philippe Champagne, on this subject. She did not sense in him a great eagerness to act.
In Minister Champagne’s office, we remind you that the revision of the Copyright Act is one of the objectives of his mandate, for him and his colleague at Heritage, Pablo Rodriguez. We say we have started discussions, but we are not giving any deadline for tabling a bill.