the real cost of education

(image courtesy the Netherlands Nationaal Archief)

On his Excess Copyright blog, lawyer Howard Knopf is advocating to have folks complain to the Copyright Board about a recent Access Copyright tariff proposal. Notice the clever similarity between Knopf's blog-name and the name of Canada's Copyright Licensing Agency. It's no accident. Knopf is a long-time critic of collective copyright licensing in Canada.

Access Copyright currently holds licenses with Canadian educational institutions (K-12 and post-secondary) designed to compensate creators and publishers for the large quantity of photocopying (beyond fair dealing) that goes on in the service of education. The recent proposed tariff aims to follow education's natural move away from photocopying and toward increased use of digital copies of copyright-protected work.

The principle behind AC's tariff proposal is quite easy to support (I believe). While educational tools may change, payment for those tools will always be required. After all, in the move from chalkboards to data-projectors, did schools get the data projectors for free?

I'm also guessing that outfitting a school for data projection costs quite a bit more than slate and chalk.

Won't someone think of the students!?

So, why is Knopf asking people to complain about the new AC tariff proposal? Here are a selection of quotations to help us understand:

"AC wants educators and students (i.e. taxpayers) to pay for much stuff and uses that are or should be free, if the law is properly understood and applied."

"AC wants to take $45 per year from each of university students and $35 for each of the college students per [year?]. That’s about $60,000,000 a year for those who keep track of taxpayers’ money"

"Think of all the advanced research chairs or library books that could be bought for these tens of millions of dollars."

That last quote is a doozy. These are the (frustrating) arguments Canada's professional creators, producers and publishers have been battered with for years now.

Paying for copyright-protected content is so expensive! Think of the poor students and their educational debt-burden! Think of all the other great things all that money could buy!

The way I read his posting, Knopf believes most educational uses of content should be free. He even bemoans the fact that the proposed Bill C-32 (An Act to Amend the Copyright Act) will not solve the problem of paid content since C-32's already broad educational exception is not broad enough.

Having paid off student debt in the past, and anticipating quite a bit more of it in the future (unless my kids get baseball scholarships, as planned), I am just as concerned with the cost of education as Mr. Knopf is. The numbers Knopf quotes are pretty scary. So, I went in search of more information.

Sixty Million Dollars

Knopf calculates that the total AC tariff for every Canadian college and university student (of which there are 1.5 million) will be $60,000,000. That's a big number. Knopf also makes the interesting assumption that this cost will necessarily have to be paid by the students themselves.

But let's keep in mind that the tariff will cover the legitimate copyright costs of every single student in every single post-secondary institute in the country. How many post-sec institutions are there in Canada? I just asked Google that question and came back with a list of roughly 2000.

Following Knopf's lead down the path of simple mathematics:

$60,000,000 divided by 2000 = $30,000 per institution.

Now, $30,000 is a far less scary number. Of course, $30,000 represents a very inaccurate mean number, since the actual cost of the tariff is calculated per student. Still, you'd think just about any post-sec in Canada could afford to pay $45 per student for educational content themselves without passing on that cost to the students themselves.

Could they? Let's see:

Picking a Canadian post-sec completely at random, I see that the University of Ottawa's Annual Report balance sheet for the year 2007-08 shows a revenue of $806.1 million.

Wow. What was that number again?

$806.1 million. That's almost one Billion dollars.

Okay, and that year they had 35,548 students. Under the proposed tariff, therefore, U of O would be looking at a total tariff cost of roughly $1.6 million.

Could they afford to pay that $1.6 million without adding it to the student burden?

Well, as an expense, the tariff represents a minuscule .2% of their total revenues. How does that compare with some of their other expense percentages?:

Maintenance and utilities = 3.7%
Supplies = 4.5%
Furniture & Equipment (data projectors?) = 5.5%
Scholarships & Bursaries = 5.9%
Buildings & Renovations = 13.3%
Other = 11%

All of which combined comes to 43.9% of the expense picture for the University of Ottawa (just one of 2,000 Canadian post-sec institutions). So where do their other expenses go?

Salaries & Benefits = 56.1%


What are the real costs of education in Canada?

Well, I don't claim to know what all of the real costs are, but looking at this one representative university tells me one thing for certain -- fair payment for copyright-protected content hardly even registers as a cost at all.

University of Ottawa could take .2% from its Salaries & Benefits line, move it to the Supplies line and every single U of O student's content usage would be paid for. What's more, Salaries & Benefits would still represent 55.9% of total expenses.

But why attack the Salaries & Benefits of Canada's hard-working educators? I think they are worth every dollar they're paid. Why not just devote .2 of the 11% in the mysterious Other expense line to paying the copyright tariff. In fact, just 7% of that Other line would be able to pay the tariff for every post-sec student in Canada.

Wow, one randomly selected university could reasonably afford to pay the entire tariff for every student in the country, without touching any of their currently identifiable expense lines.

Imagine that.

One last point

At the end of his call for objections to the tariff, Howard Knopf discloses that he is an affiliate of Access Copyright and that he does receive a share of the license payments each year:

"I do cash their little cheques each year, and hopefully redistribute the sum to good causes."

I'm not sure what Mr. Knopf means when he says that hopefully he redistributes his AC money to good causes. I am also an AC affiliate, and I also receive a cheque each year. While my cheque is almost certainly the same size as Knopf's, I don't consider it little, and I know for certain that I redistribute it to a good cause.

My AC cheque goes into Registered Education Savings Plans for my kids.

lock up the artists, UPDATE

I want to quickly recognize I have come late to the CMEC discussion -- creative work getting in the way of fighting for my creative work.

Chris Moore and Julianna Yau have great responses as well. Of course, Howard Knopf also disagrees, but in a very Dirty Harry, lawyerly way. And I'm not sure he understands the concepts of text and curriculum in the same way I do. Fair enough.

bedfellows

I'm saddened there hasn't been more vocal support for Chris Moore's suggestion that the government appoint a royal commission on copyright. It seems to me a wonderful, workable solution, and a way to get this thing out of the various camps and into the public sphere in a less political way. Some folks are hung up on the fact that Moore would prefer WIPO ratification ahead of the commission, but I file that under "suggestions." With or without ratification, a commission would, I think, introduce true "fairness" to what has become, increasingly, an exercise in rhetoric. You know, except for me -- I seek truth by day and battle crime by night.

Keeping the commission on the table, I turn my attention to Howard Knopf, a law-talking guy whose own rhetoric has kept me pretty much away from his actual opinions for awhile now. Yesterday however, I was tipped to go and have another look. Low and behold, and to my surprise and slight embarrassment at closing my own mind, I find myself agreeing with a whole lot of what Knopf is saying these days. For instance:

"It would have been better in some respects to see the bill in all its detail..."

As well, while there are some points in the following I might want to get into a short interpretation or testing debate over (as noted by my BOLDing), I am generally very impressed by this reasoned and balanced list of suggestions for the government. It would make for wonderful discussion material at a royal commission. My strongest message in all of this has been even as we move into exciting new business models and access avenues on copyright, please don't minimize the actual law to the point of impotence. In my opinion, this list of suggestions, depending on interpretation, would not do that, and instead addresses the creators' and users' common concerns about access and fair dealing, without making an end run around the valid rights-holding necessary for a cultural economy. Let me stress that my BOLDing below does NOT mean I necessarily disagree with these points, but rather that I would want to see real, fair, public discussion on the interpretation of these points. Where would that discussion happen, you ask. Not on Facebook, I'm thinking.

From Knopf:

The Government should rework the bill that it obviously had profound second thoughts about and come up with one that ensures that:

1. ISPs should face no liability for users’ activities if they to respond promptly to “notice and notice” demands. “Notice and takedown” is not appropriate in Canada.

2. DRM and TPM protection measures must be minimal at most and not circumvent user’s rights to do anything otherwise legal under the Copyright Act or interfere with users’ first sale and exhaustion rights and must be directed at specific behaviour and not multipurpose technology.

3. Users’ rights must be extended to include such fair dealing rights as parody, time shifting and format shifting. They should be inclusive and not exhaustive, i.e. with inclusion of inclusive language such as “such as”....Broadcasters should get their ephemeral rights. There’s no need and no basis for a special educational exception for the internet.

4. The private copying levy scheme should be repealed.

5. Any “Making available” right must require proof of actual and prejudicial distribution.

6. Statutory minimum damages should be eliminated against:
a. Any person (individual or corporate) and any third parties serving them when there is a bona fide belief that the activity is fair dealing
b. Any person (individual or corporate) doing anything without any expectation of direct financial gain.

This government could earn immense respect from countless real Canadians and people who watch Canada around the world if it shows real leadership here.

HK