Using Copyright Protected Material in a Digital Medium is Now Possible!

Article

This text was initially published by Profweb under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence, before Eductive was launched.

This column is a complement to Isabelle Laplante’s, ” The Rights and Responsibilities of Publishing Digital Course Notes” and addresses one of the responsibilities associated with this type of publication – respect for copyright when using published material. Please refer to Isabelle’s column regarding the use of material available on the Internet.

In July 2011, the Fédération des cégeps et l’Association des collèges privés du Québec signed an agreement with Copibec that allowed professors of member institutions to reproduce extracts of millions of foreign and Canadian works on paper or digitally. A list is sent annually to institutions to identify those categories of works, publishers and specific documents excluded from this vast directory. Copibec, the organization that manages copyright in Quebec, has doubled the material available. While previous licences covered photocopies, that of 2011-2014 now legalizes the presentation of copyrighted material on PowerPoint used in a classroom, on an interactive whiteboard and on digital copies of excerpts of works on an intranet with restricted access possible on platforms such as Profweb, Moodle, Léa, etc.

The cost of this license is determined by the number of full-time students enroled. Insofar as a teacher respects a limit of the lesser of 10% or 25 pages for a single publication given to the same group of students, the number of uses of excerpts of copyrighted material is unlimited, whether on paper or digital support. However, to properly distribute the royalties to authors and publishers whose material is reproduced, the license includes a requirement to report bibliographic data used digitally or in course notes to Copibec.

Institutions have been encouraged to establish a system to facilitate the reporting of excerpts of works used in course notes as well as those digitally reproduced. After all, although it does not cost more to use an excerpt with a college license, a statement attributing credit to an author and/or publisher directs a fair and equitable compensation to those content creators out of the royalties paid by colleges and schools.

We advise teachers to verify which methods have been chosen to declare digital material with administrators responsible for copyright compliance at their school. The massive use of photocopied materials has proven the worth of popular works published as supplements to teaching. With the possibilities offered by digital materials, this value can only increase.

For more information and details on Copibec and the license for the reproduction of works at the college, please visit our website and watch our three information capsules.