From Publishing Perspectives:
A bilingual coalition of Canadian publishing and associated organizations, including Access Copyright, today (November 30), is calling on Heritage minister Pascale St-Onge and innovation, science, and industry minister François-Philippe Champagne to meet with them urgently on the need to finally follow through on the government’s promise in the 2022 federal budget to ensure “that the Copyright Act protects all creators and copyright holders.”
As Publishing Perspectives readers will recall, in August a larger roster of organizations, councils, associations, guilds, and federations—representing more than 50,000 publishers, writers, and visual artists—sent a single demand to St-Onge: fix the 2012 Canadian “Copyright Modernization Act,” which they say has been a CA$200 million disaster for the book business ($US147.3 million).
The apparent silence from the Canadian government now has been accentuated by what Access Copyright reports was a “tabling last week in the House of Commons of a report by the Standing Committee on Science and Research on Support for the Commercialization of Intellectual Property that recommended, among other things, ‘That the government of Canada undertake a review of the Copyright Act in order to study appropriate remuneration for Canadian content creators, particularly as it relates to educational material.’”
“Called to testify last spring as part of the study by the Standing Committee on Science and Research, Gilles Herman (Éditions du Septentrion), then vice-president of [Québec’s copyright collection agency] Copibec, rightly pointed out that in 2012, the legislature added several exceptions to the Copyright Act allowing circumvention of intellectual property, including introducing the concept of fair dealing for educational purposes, without specifying its scope of application.
“Since then, most Canadian educational institutions have disengaged from the collective licensing regime they had previously adhered to, resulting in financial losses of approximately $200 million in 10 years, directly attributable to this legislative gap. ‘If the Canadian government does not correct the copyright law, the risk is that the education sector of the future will no longer teach Canadian content because Canadian publishers will have simply disappeared,’ he affirmed.
Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives