Digital Copyright Canada

The following was received from Pippa Wysong about recent Access Copyright lobbying. It is republished with permission. If you are also a fellow author who feels your rights are being attacked by this policy, please contact me.

Pippa Wysong wrote:

I have just read the letter from Access Copyright responding to the Council of Ministers of Education (attached).

As a Creator who contributes to both the print and digital media (if you Google my name, you’ll get over 900 ‘hits’, most of which are complete stories I’ve written and have been paid for), I find that some of the arguments in the letter are ones I cannot support.

I am a freelance journalist, specializing in medical and science writing, and I write for publications ranging from magazines and newspapers, to educational websites.

Being in the business, I’m usually happy with the way my materials are handled on websites. A client buys a story and puts it on their website which anyone can read.

Fine, that’s the same as people walking into a library and reading back issues of magazines that have my stories in them.

Some clients buy a story, and post it on a password protected website. Sometimes there is a fee involved; usually there is no fee. This is fine too. I still get paid for my work, sometimes (depending) there is a small royalty that comes from the client for this use. Royalties tend to be given for eletronic rights, in general, anyway. And this is fine too. (By the way, these royalties work within a system independent of anything Access Copyright does. I think AccessCopyright needs to consider whether some of the systems they are (or have) setting-up are redundant with other royalty systems and contracts).

I will soon be building my own website. Having a good familiarity with the Internet, I will only be posting material I don’t mind having lots of people read. If they send copies to their moms by email – that’s Fair Use. That’s fine.

If readers copy a story of mine and post it on a money-earning website – then that’s a problem. In fact, that’s more of a real problem than the one AccessCopyright is addressing. (Use of my stories on no-profit sites, I usually ignore. Use on profit-sites I go after).

Anybody who claims they are losing money because people are reading or copying work from their website likely has unrealistic expectations about the technology and reader behaviour. People need to understand the technology and the medium before using it. If you want work protected, use password protected sections on your site. Provide just samples on the main site. In the meantime, most other website out there have no password protection.

Making readers buy licenses for things that are out in the open is penalizing everyone else for a very small number of website creators who don’t understand the technology. In fact, it’s penalizing readers in some parts of the world, and not in others. The licences would be bought in Canada, but websites can be accessed from anywhere on the planet. And who’s to say Canadians access and copy things only from Canadian websites??

If fees are collected for Internet licences, is AccessCopyright going to distribute royalties to people around the world? How will they know who to distribute the fees to? If the fees go only to Canadians who register their websites to AccessCopyright, it’s not a fair system by any means. (From my own use, the sites I use change daily, and very few are Canadian).

Additional licences for the Internet is also penalizing an education system that can’t even afford enough to make basic repairs to schools. The fees used for licences will be taken out of the budget for something else students will need; maybe soccerballs, maybe textbooks. I suspect the vast majority of Internet use for school is by students and teachers using material under Fair Use. These people are not lost customers, and are not turning around to use material they’ve copied from the Internet for profit. In fact, students probably delete Internet material after a relevant assignment is finished.

Also, material from the Internal ends up on people’s hard-drives without them actually copying it. Even when you are simply browsing websites, ‘copies’ of the pages are automatically saved in your computer’s cache. Does this count as ‘copying’?

Students doing research for a history project using information from websites -- this is clearly a not-for-profit action, and falls under Fair Use. What do students use from Internet resources in terms of information (excluding music) that falls outside the jurisdiction of Fair Use? Has anybody really studied this?

I would like to see evidence, using data collected and analysed by an independent source, to show that there is truly lost revenue to creators by educational use of the Internet. Who exactly is the proposed licence protecting?

The letter says “The education sector contends that the only works online that should be given copyright protection and payment for use are those that are locked down using technological protection measures. However, these measures would actually push creators to limit, rather than encourage, access to their works. The education sector believes that even if those copyright owners include a copyright notice prohibiting use of their works on their websites, those works should be considered there to be used for free, and that does not respect the choice of copyright owners.”

Two things.

1. I would like to see evidence showing that if the material was for sale, that people would actually buy it. Or, that if they copy it, that they are somehow making a profit from it (the real issue). I think much of this ‘lost revenue’ to creators is imaginary. Unless someone can truly show me otherwise, I suspect that most use is for Fair Use purposes.

2. What the education sector apparently contends in this paragraph makes sense. What makes anyone think a larger portion of websites would become password protected? Why would the current pattern change? The number of password protected sites does not seem prohibitive, and I see no reason for that to change in future. “These measures would actually push creators to limit, rather than encourage, access to their works,” – sounds like an unfounded assumption.

It would seem to me that licenses, in this case, would drive up the cost of getting information. It’s a further burden on educational institutions, using money that has more urgent uses. I’ve always heard that investing in education is investing in your future. I suspect that educational Internet licenses would add up to a huge number of dollars, would those dollars be invested in as valuable a commodity? And would the dollars collected truly reflect dollars lost by creators?

Sincerely,

Pippa Wysong
Freelance Medical, Science and Children’s Writer (Toronto)

BIO

Pippa is an award-winning medical, science and children's journalist and has been a journalist since the mid-1980’s. She writes the science column "Ask Pippa" for the kids' page in the Toronto Star and reviews children's books. She has written news and features on health and science for The Globe & Mail, Canadian Living, KidsWorld Magazine, Weekly Reader teen and kid publications, The Medical Post, AccessExcellence.org, and more. She served on the boards of the Royal Canadian Institute (RCI) for the Advancement of Science, and the Canadian Science Writers' Association. Pippa founded the kids' club for the RCI, has done media consulting, and was presented with a Queen’s Jubilee medal for volunteer work in promoting science communication and literacy.

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