You may have heard the terms "Access Copyright" and "Copyright Act" tossed around a lot lately, along with legalese terms about policies, legislation, fair use and more. It can be a bit confusing, so here's what you as students need to know.

Access Copyright is an organization made up of authors and publishers — the people who produce the content you use every day at school: articles, books, textbooks and more. It offers schools, businesses and other institutions permission to copy works such as books, textbooks, newspapers, journals and more for a fee. The money from these fees is distributed by Access Copyright to compensate the creators of the works used.

This summer, a proposed fee hike — which would see schools' Access Copyright tariffs increase almost tenfold — sent many Canadian academic institutions running. "They had done something similar with the primary and secondary schools and it had been resolved," explained Marilyn Turner, Acting Manager of Library and Media Services. "Now they are attempting to resolve it with colleges and universities."

In response to the proposal, "A group of the universities across Canada (Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada) and the community colleges across Canada (Association of Canadian Community Colleges) each filed a petition with the Copyright Board to say, 'We don't want to pay not quite 10 times as much, and we don't think we should have to,'" Turner explained.

The Copyright Board of Canada, a governmental institution, said each group could bring forward its questions and concerns, and the Board would make a ruling. The tariff will stay at its current rate until the issue is resolved, which Turner expects will take some time.

As of right now, there are no changes to the Copyright Act. "We (have always) operated under it, and under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Act, and the Fair Dealing Policy has recently been clarified in the College's policy," said Turner. "The discussions people see are about the proposed legislation or about the Access Copyright proposal."

In the meantime, here's what you need to know about copyright to ensure you stay out of any legal issues.

Fair Dealing Policy
Turner said: "We are guided by the Copyright Act and a document called the Fair Dealing Policy, which has been developed by ACCC — and something very similar has been developed by the AUCC for the university sector — and it talks about a lot of things that you can do with Fair Dealing. It has been adopted by Fanshawe and it is in the Copyright Policy, which is posted online."

This is a guideline about using books, articles and more for your own personal use or for research. "The main things of fair dealing are how much of an item are you copying?" said Linda Crosby, Technical Services and Systems Librarian. The Fair Dealing Policy is very specific about how much of a text you are able to copy without getting permission or paying a fee, such as 10 per cent of a published work or 5 per cent of a textbook.

"If you're writing a paper about nuclear physics and you put in a reference to what Richard Feynman said, absolutely you can put it in there — it's not stopping people (from doing that) at all," explained Turner. "But to photocopy all of Richard Feynman's book and give it to your brother-in-law as a birthday present, that's no good."

Sharing information and media online
According to Turner, copying and pasting information from a website into an email you send to a friend is a copyright violation, because you haven't received permission to copy that information. Linking directly to the web page, however, is okay. "In terms of putting things on FanshaweOnline, by and large, if you're putting a link up, that's okay."

If you want to share an article online with a friend, send him the direct link to the webpage rather than copying and pasting, suggested Crosby. Rather than photocopying part of a book to share with a friend, direct her to the book and page number.

Consequences
"There aren't typically 'copyright police' looking through everything we do," said Crosby, "but certainly with the new tariff coming in and everybody's awareness being raised about that issue, there always has been and always can be the opportunity for someone to come in and say, 'I want to look at a bunch of stuff you've got here and find out if any of them have broken copyright.'"

Due to the lack of case law, outlining actual consequences for breaking the Copyright Act is a bit tricky, said Crosby, "but I think it tends to be on the harsh side."

In short
Turner summed up everything pretty simply: "You can make a photocopy of something for your own use. You can include all the stuff you would normally include in your research papers — providing you cite it appropriately. You can put links (directly to) articles and share them with other people."

"Nobody wants people to stop using books," she continued. "Nobody wants people to stop sharing information — that's not the purpose of this. The purpose is that people who are creating works are appropriately compensated for them."

A LibGuide to Copyright can be found at fanshawec.libguides.com — select Copyright from the list of topics on the left. There you can find tons of information about Fair Dealing, Print Copying, Public Performance Rights, Open Access and more. If you'd prefer to speak to someone in person, the library staff is friendly and helpful, and can help anybody wade through the sometimes-murky copyright waters.

For more information about Access Copyright, check out accesscopyright.ca.