Nitpick: We are not *all* complete dumbasses

[shadowspar]

I really wish all the story headlines, tweets, etc, floating around about how the administration at UofT and Western knuckled under to Access Copyright could be rewritten from

Canadian Universities Submit to Completely Dumbass Copyright Agreement

to

Two Canadian Universities Submit to Completely Dumbass Copyright Agreement

We are not all cowardly dumbasses, and in fact, I would venture to say that the majority of us are quite wroth with the doubtless small number of administrators who approved this deal at a small number of admittedly major Canadian universities.

Comments

[zulu]

This is interesting--why do you say it's cowardly? My university rejected Access Copyright this year and it seems to have made no end of problems (and piracy as a solution to those problems). I saw Access Copyright as sort of the iTunes of academic articles: you could pay to access them, and that was better than stealing them, which was the easy alternative. But admittedly I haven't done a lot of digging on this: that's only my experience.

Oops, and now I see it's the inflated price that's a particular problem. Apologies--I should have read the article first.

[shadowspar]

I can't speak to the exact situation at your school, but from what I gather -- at ours and the other schools in our consortium, the amount of copying we do that's actually covered by Access Copyright has become vanishingly small. Access Copyright only covers print works, and the overwhelming majority of our academic journals are electronic subscriptions, for which we pay handsomely. We license these directly from the publishers, so we don't need Access Copyright's blessing to copy those. An increasing amount of the material profs use is open access, public domain, creative commons, or freely available in some other way; some is covered by licensing agreements outside of Access Copyright. And then there's the argument about how much of the copying that Access Copyright covers falls within fair dealing and shouldn't have to be paid for anyway.

The rate is part of it -- the increase they ended up with is in the neighbourhood of 500%, at a time when the total amount of copying we do that they cover is less than ever. With the not-so-subtle implication of a lawsuit for universities who don't sign up, I don't think it's overreaching to use the term "protection racket" to describe Access Copyright's behaviour.

Most of the Canadian universities seemed to be on board with presenting a united front and standing up to Access Copyright -- that is, until these two deals were announced. So, that's why I'm a bit testy about them. ^_^;

[zulu]

Thanks for explaining it a bit further; it makes more sense now.

[libskrat]

Story I'm hearing from my Canadian librarian friends is that yeah, there's a lotta head-shaking going on at other Canadian unis.

It's the email panopticon that just beats the hell outta me. How could anybody think that was a good (or in any way acceptable) idea?

[shadowspar]

Yeah, I still have no idea how that would have got past the administration. You have to wonder if they made some egregious mistake when it comes to understanding the text of the agreement, like Howard suggests. I would think something like this could end up prompting a faculty exodus.