



Leaving aside the specific dollar amount, this is certainly a good deal for Access Copyright. It doesn’t garner the $45 per student it was seeking, but even Maureen Cavan, the Access Copyright Executive Director, acknowledged that was an upper limit. With declining revenues (revenues dropped by 11.6% last year), getting the universities back into the fold before they fully developed systems without the need for Access Copyright was understandably a priority. Reaching this deal despite a relatively weak bargaining position is a win for the collective.

In the short term, this looks like a terrible deal for AUCC. Many of its members have opted out of Access Copyright altogether and while there were some expected early challenges, the concerns associated with clearing specific content or finding alternatives appears to have subsided. For those universities not ready to opt-out (including my own), an interim tariff was available at a fraction of the cost of the new deal. Moreover, with fair dealing about to be expanded to include education (which Access Copyright board members have suggested would allow for widespread uncompensated copying), a new exception for publicly available materials on the Internet, and the Supreme Court of Canada decision in the Crookes case that removed concerns about liability for linking, the law is increasingly on AUCC’s side.

Given the legal reforms and the increasing comfort with operating outside of Access Copyright, why did AUCC settle?  I have no inside information, but my guess would focus on three factors. First, AUCC has never appeared comfortable with the copyright file. For years, its members paid millions to Access Copyright without giving it much thought. It was only after the collective sought a massive increase that it captured the attention of senior officials at Canadian universities, who began to question the value of the licence. AUCC, led on this issue by a former publisher association executive, has always seen copyright as a cost, not a cause. Once Toronto and Western struck deals with Access Copyright, the broad framework was established and an AUCC deal for a model for its remaining members was likely only a matter of time.

Second, a prolonged fight at the Copyright Board (and perhaps later at the Federal Court) is very expensive. Unlike the $26 per student tariff that will be borne by students in their tuition fees, the regulatory and litigation costs are more difficult to pass along directly to students. By striking a deal now, AUCC saves millions in fees, though students will ultimately bear the costs of its settlement.

Third, the short term advantage may have rested with AUCC, but there were some serious longer term risks. While many experts question the Access Copyright repertoire and the value of its licence, the Copyright Board has increasingly fashioned itself as a guardian of the collective. The Board’s decision to issue an interim tariff without any reasoning hours before most people were heading into a holiday week was an embarrassment (the claims of urgency were proven wrong) and left little doubt that the Board was prepared to do almost anything to assist Access Copyright. The subsequent decisions, which included warnings about the difficulty of opting-out of Access Copyright, further entrenched the view that a hearing before the Board would not end well for AUCC, no matter the law nor the limited value of the Access Copyright repertoire.

What is lost with this settlement is the chance for something better. The shift away from Access Copyright in recent months has led to a growing awareness of the large number of licensed materials on university campuses, the benefits of open access, the emergence of open educational resources, and the move to digital course materials. Investing in new open materials – which pay the creator but allow for more flexible use and reuse – would offer innovative teaching materials at the very time that Canadian higher education should be rethinking how course materials are developed and disseminated in a digital world. This is hard work as new models require real investment, commitment from faculty, and patience from students. The payoff would have been significant, but the AUCC is seemingly more interested in “cost certainty” than in education innovation.  The big question now is whether its members feel the same.  My guess is that most will sign, but perhaps some will carefully assess their experience of operating outside the collective and see some short term pain for long term gain.



  1. The rights are more important than the art
    That is what is wrong.

  2. Les Nessman says:

    copy of the model agreement
    It appears a copy of the model is avilable at

  3. Sandy Crawley says:

    @Doug Webb
    Not so. Canadian artists participated in this negotiation and it actually represents a significant saving for many institutions and many students when compared to the last decade or so. Both parties to this agreement are appropristely exploiting modern technologies to raise the standard and depth of accessibility to Canadian made educational materials.

  4. pat donovan says:

    arb. preemptive guilt!
    if you can charge students for what they MIGHT do, use or view… for a pay-per-use/read library

    then, after years of posting on various webs, so can I. After all, they might be terrorists there, right?

    They have NO idea how many students don’t read ANYTHING. Verbal learners at a study session, anyone?

    this is insane.

  5. @Sandy
    While I’m mostly ambivalent, I tend to agree more with Doug. When the most important thing to a creator is making sure they paid for possible uses, then they probably should be looking for jobs in a different career field. I can understand publishers wanting that though because they only exist to make money, not create anything. Yes digital technology is scary, but people need to look forward not backward, and I don’t see this really having any forward thinking.

  6. AUCC President Paul Davidson was head of the Association of Canadian Publishers in the 90s and though he wasn’t on the board of Access Copyright he must have been involved in what they were doing.

  7. Sandy, in some ways I am glad that there looks an end to this battle. The amount of $26 is about twice what people were paying previously but at least it’s not four times as originally asked by AC! I also hope the invasive ‘assurance’ provisions were omitted as I fail to see how open access to school databases could not be considered as anything but overly invasive.

    Maybe now with only $26 costing going to the students, there will be funding left over for some other explorations of innovative media uses in the classroom.

  8. Swiler Bob says:

    More than meets the eye
    Unless I am missing something here, Section 5, “Additional Conditions Applicable to Digital Copies”, “Digital Copies of Repertoire Works shall not be transmitted to, posted or uploaded to, or stored on any computer network other than a Secure Network.”, seems fundamentally unworkable.

    That means computers owned and controlled by the university and on a university campus, as anything else cannot be secure. All material “read online” is in fact downloaded and saved to a storage device (i.e., a local hard drive), whether the user realises this or not. Material “read online”, i.e., downloaded, is normally saved by a browser in a cache somewhere on the local computer. Even if the cache is cleared (i.e., the material is erased), the material still remains on the computer’s storage device until it may or may not get overwritten by future downloaded material.

    How can this possibly work?