“This legislation could well end our ability to contribute to building Canadian and overseas learning communities,” said AU President Dr. Frits Pannekoek, about the federal government’s upcoming new copyright legislation. “Countries with wiser copyright regimes that promote educational use will catapult ahead of Canada. No longer will we be internationally competitive because of the restrictions contained in the legislation.”

The government is currently holding consultations and is expected to present new legislation in the fall.

The issue of copyright is one of the reasons behind AU’s support of a new website, WikiEducator, which is making open access material and learning content freely available on the web, said Rory McGreal, associate vice-president research at AU. “The very stringent copyright laws the Canadian government is currently considering are based on a U.S. model. It would make it very difficult, particularly for open and online institutions, to make use of proprietary content. We have to look for alternatives.”

Currently over 50 per cent of royalties for all books, movies, music, and multi-media games go to the U.S., McGreal said, so the U.S. has a big stake in exerting proprietary ownership.

One small example of the difficulties created by the proposed laws is that academic institutions will be required to destroy online proprietary material within one week of the final exam. For a university such as AU, where exams are taken year round, it’s an absurd law, McGreal said. “The new laws are encouraging people to develop a parallel system of open software and open educational material that bypasses the proprietary system. As the laws get more stringent and restrictive, people just won’t use proprietary material.”

Among other issues, Dr. Pannekoek believes the following could have a profound negative effect on teaching, learning and research:

- Digital locks that prevent educators and researchers from exercising their fair dealing rights;

- Proposed penalties for breaking digital locks that will make it criminal for educators/researchers to exercise their fair dealing rights;

- Proposed penalties for format shifting so that users have to keep paying again and again and again if they want to use their purchased content on different devices;

- Proposed penalties for those who would keep digital course research documents on their computer longer than 3 days;

- Restrictions on digital course materials requiring their destruction after the final examination for each course;

- The growing body of orphan works (millions of books, articles, videos, audio tracks, etc.) that cannot be accessed because of copyright extensions;

- Digital library loans do not have the same legal support that we have traditionally allowed for physical interlibrary loans;

- Statutory damages are payable by educators and researchers even if they believed that their use was legal under fair dealing. There is no provision for warning before educators/researchers are liable.