I'm coming back to you with my University of Victoria hat on. I'm associate university librarian at the University of Victoria and head of the law library.
I thought it might prudent to just clarify a little bit about our experience with our decision to exit the Access Copyright blanket licence, which I think was in about 2013. In our experience, and I think this might mirror some other universities, as well, or other colleges, we had been thinking about doing this for quite some years prior to the Copyright Modernization Act and the legislative changes of 2012, and even prior to the Supreme Court decisions that came out that same year.
What we were finding was that many of our reproductions that we were using were actually already open access or already included from licensed databases. We do continue to buy quite a number of Canadian books. We have, at the University of Victoria, what is called an approval plan where books come in automatically if they meet certain criteria. There's an entire approval plan dedicated to Canadian authors, publications. Those come in automatically; we don't even bother selecting them.
It was our experience that the tariff, the blanket licence, was not actually matching what we were reproducing. The other issue that we were finding was it was very hard to discover what, in fact, was covered by the Access Copyright repertoire. For the time that was involved there, we realized, we would probably be just as fine seeking permissions and paying for those permissions when needed or buying books generally.
I don't know if I have any more time, but I just wanted to also, wearing my University of Victoria hat, talk about the public domain laws that I mentioned earlier.
One example of things that we can do with that would have been to digitize the laws of a particular jurisdiction and make them available publicly. We were not able to do that because of the fees associated with getting permissions. However, a private company in the United States was able to afford that and they have made those laws available through a licensed database. These are the kinds of things that we would love to be able to do. I know many entrepreneurs who are just looking for data to absorb so that they can work in the legal technology area and create tools and resources to make use of primary law once it's publicly available and publicly accessible without restriction.
Thank you.