Copyright litigation extra work for teachers

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This article was published 14/12/2019 (2331 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Caught up in a legal dispute that has created hours of additional work at certain schools across the country, at least one Manitoba school division has had to assign extra staff to deal with the demands of a court process over copyright of classroom materials.

Teachers in several elementary and high schools in the province are required to gather and photocopy texts and resource materials that have been used in their classrooms since 2013, as part of a legal battle that has stretched on for nearly two years in the Federal Court.

Eight schools in the Pembina Trails School Division are among those in 65 divisions across the country that have been randomly selected to provide curriculum material to the court as a way to determine how schools use copyrighted work. Much of the task has fallen to teachers and other educational staff, said Bob Mauthe, president of the Pembina Trails Teachers’ Association.

“They’re stressed about it. This is an extra thing that they’re having to do, and, of course, we don’t have a choice at all. Teachers have to comply with this. So it’s another piece that has to be done at a very, very busy time for teachers,” he said.

Pembina Trails said it has devoted more staff resources as a result of the court discovery process, including offering to pay part-time educators to complete the work.

Mauthe said he was told substitute teachers would fill in while teachers gathered the material, but a spokeswoman said the school division isn’t hiring extra substitute teachers.

The Federal Court has set deadlines of Dec. 31 for school boards and Feb. 28, 2020, for individual schools to submit the material.

Mauthe said teachers have to submit all “resource materials” they have at school related to the curriculum. He said he was told teachers don’t have to submit material not located at school.

“Some teachers are done very quickly; a couple hours,” he said. “Other teachers are finding that it’s taking them 10, 20 hours or more to comply with this.”

It’s unclear how many Manitoba schools are affected.

A spokeswoman for Winnipeg School Division said it was required to submit certain copyright-related documents, but not to the extent some schools have been required to do.

Manitoba’s Education Department didn’t release the number or names of schools in the province that have been ordered to submit their materials.

“The litigation is a national issue involving most provinces and federal copyright legislation concerning the use of copyrighted material by schools for teaching purposes. School divisions across Canada have been selected at random to determine how they use copyrighted material. No school division is being sued through this litigation, and they are providing information requested by the court,” the department’s statement said.

All territories and provinces except Quebec and British Columbia are involved in the legal action.

It began in February 2018, when provincial and territorial education departments, including Ontario school boards, sued the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, known as Access Copyright. They claimed their education departments overpaid more than $25 million in copyright fees for the reproduction of published literary works used in K-12 schools from 2010 to 2012.

Access Copyright launched a counter-suit, claiming it is owed more than $50 million in unpaid royalties because Canadian schools make more than 150 million copies of copyrighted material that needs to be paid for.

Manitoba stopped paying the fees in 2013. Copyright fees are set by law at a cost divided by the number of full-time students. It was $4.81 per student from 2005 to 2009, but the education departments argued they overpaid by $2.35 per student from 2010 to 2012. After copyright law was changed, they decided to “opt out” of paying the fees, according to their statement of claim.

In a statement, Access Copyright said the education departments and Ontario school boards could avoid “any burdens of this lawsuit” by agreeing to pay the fees, which it describes as “the cost of a cup of coffee per student.”

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca