Alex Wagstaff
Copy Editor
Along with more than 30 other Canadian colleges and universities, York has ditched Access Copyright.
And it’s about time.
The organization is responsible for licensing copyrighted materials to educational institutions for photocopying and course kits—for a price. And the price has been going up for years.
The last straw for Canadian schools came this year when Access Copyright announced its new pricing scheme. Instead of 10 cents per page on course kits and $3.38 per full-time student, Access Copyright proposed universities pay an all-inclusive $45 per full-time student—13 times the old rate.
With York at its highest-ever enrolment this year, that would make for a huge tariff. York’s 45,600 full-time students at $45 apiece comes out to over $2 million. That’s money better spent here on campus.
But the money’s not the only reason we should be glad to be rid of Access Copyright.
No, what’s really troublesome is the organization’s refusal to keep up with the times.
Only a tiny fraction of its collection is available digitally. Instead Access Copyright continues to push photocopies down universities’ throats even as they lose relevance. Paper’s nice to read, sure, but who really wants to carry loads of heavy course kits?
Access Copyright’s agreement is full of restrictions, many of them not even in line with already-strict Canadian copyright law. For instance, it considers the definition of “copy” to include “projecting an image ” or ”posting a link” of copyrighted materials. Both actions are therefore covered by the exact same rules as photocopying. which only allows 10 per cent of a work to be copied.
Even more ridiculous is the proposed enforcement policy. In order to ensure compliance, it’s proposed that party institutions must grant Access Copyright “right of access throughout the educational institution’s premises, including full access to the secure network.”
Taken in isolation, these moves might look like a sequence of bad decisions. But when you look at the whole picture, a clear image emerges. Access Copyright isn’t just out of the loop. It acutely fears change.
Just like the music industry did a decade ago, Access Copyright and the rest of the publishing industry are seeing the rug slip out from under them, and panicking. Charging exorbitant licensing fees isn’t so different from the RIAA launching multi-million-dollar suits against MP3 downloaders. Both are moves of desperation from organizations unprepared for the future, trying to squeeze a last few dollars out of a dying trade.
Access Copyright probably seemed like a pretty good deal when it was founded in 1988. For a then-reasonable price, a university could ensure that all of the materials included in its course packs was legal and that the authors got a cut. It would have been nice to have somebody track everything down.
That was all well and good in the days of big publishing houses and hard-copy everything.
Today, more and more scholarly works are becoming available on the Internet, either freely or through subscriptions. Sure we’ll have to get used to doing things differently, but it’s already easy to find most readings on resources like JSTOR or Project Muse, both available through the York library website. And as professors adapt their classes to this new way of distributing course material, it’s only going to get easier.
Other readings can be found with a simple Google search, as open licensing becomes more and more common in academia.
Open information is the way the world is moving, and no amount of foot-dragging will change that. The price-gouging and the draconian policies will only speed up the inevitable.
It’s hard to feel bad for Access Copyright. If it had spent the last decade innovating instead of raising fees, it might still have a future. But instead of embracing digital delivery, Access Copyright continues to waste its time propping up a dead business model.
Why should we waste our time too?
