Buying course packs rather than textbooks might have been a cheaper alternative in the past, but University of Western Ontario students can expect to see an increase in the course pack fees due to increasing costs for copyrighted material.
Western’s Board of Governors approved an increase for the Access Copyright Fee to $16.45 from $2.90 for the 2010-11 academic year. This fee is included as part of the supplemental fees collected with tuition.
Access Copyright is a co-operative representing several Canadian publishers and authors, as well as some foreign authors and publishers through agreements with similar co-opertives in other countries.
Western’s five-year agreement with Access expires Aug. 31 and rather than negotiate a new agreement, Access gave notice it intends to apply to the Copyright Board of Canada to set a tariff on how the university can use copyrighted works under the provisions of the Copyright Act.
One of the terms of the proposed tariff is that all copying, including digital copying which was not covered under the previous license, would be covered by a single fee per full-time student.
Access Copyright wants to set the fee at $45 per student, which would increase Western’s payment from approximately $360,000 to about $1.5 million per year. It is expected the annual tariff will be between $25-$30, rather than the proposed $45.
“If we do not collect the funds from students, we will have to make it up as an institution,” says Gitta Kulczycki, Vice-President (Resources & Operations).
The current agreement, set in 2005, calculates payment to Access based on the number of pages of copyright material copied for student course packs, plus a set fee per full-time student to cover other incidental copying. For the 2009/10 academic year, this fee was $3.38 per student.
Western collects course pack fees from students (included in the cost of the course pack) and 86 per cent of the full-time student fee set by Access is included as part of the ancillary fees on tuition bills.
Access is extending the current agreement until Dec. 31, but as of Jan. 1, 2011 Western will be subjected to the new tariff, which has yet to be set.
The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada is considering challenging the proposed tariff before the Copyright Board, in which case a final decision may not be known for a year to 18 months.
Once the tariff is in place, the university will be required to pay retroactively to Jan. 1, 2011. Because the amount collected in course pack sales and in student fees would not cover the projected payment to Access as a result of the new tariff, the Board of Governors approved a fee increase for the upcoming academic year to mitigate the financial impact on the university.
If the tariff fee is higher than the estimate, the university will pay the difference. If lower, the surplus funds will be used towards future ancillary fees.
“If we collected too much, we will give it back to the students as relief on those fees; if we’ve not collected enough, then the university will absorb that differential,” says Kulczycki.