Geist: Significant new costs loom for students

"[Canada's] Access Copyright has now proposed a new licencing scheme to cover copying and course-packs set at $45 per university student and $35 per college student. The proposed tariff represents a massive increase over current fees, which are $3.38 per full-time equivalent student as well as 10 cents per page for course-pack copying....[T]he proposal purports to licence linking to materials to located on the Internet, lacks an exclusion for fair dealing, provides additional protection for digital locks, and features extensive, onerous reporting requirements. All these copyright demands have led to opposition from teacher and student groups....The demand for significantly higher fees is particularly surprising given the increasing shift away from the copyright collective licence for both ordinary copying and course-packs....[For example] the emergence of open access publishing, in which scholars make their work freely available online, now means that there are over 5,000 open access journals representing about 20 percent of the world’s peer reviewed journals. In many scientific areas, openly available e-prints is the standard – arXiv.org provides open access to over 620,000 articles in fields such as physics, mathematics, and computer science, while PubMedCentral provides access to millions of biomedical and life sciences articles...."