As part of our efforts to forge closer ties with educational professionals, Copibec is happy to collaborate with the Fédération québécoise des directions d'établissement d'enseignement (FQDE), which represents school principals.

This strategic collaboration comes just in time for this year’s data collection and copyright reporting process in educational institutions.

Under the licensing agreement between Copibec and the Quebec ministry of education, we collect data on an annual basis from a sampling of 400 educational institutions across the province.

The selected institutions are assigned the task of reporting their use of copyright-protected material during the school year (content photocopied, scanned or displayed onscreen).

Thanks to this process, we’re able to compensate the authors and publishers more fairly.

 

The challenge

In reality, many school management teams aren’t completely familiar with the purposes and requirements of the ministry’s agreement with Copibec.

That’s why we’re looking for ways to make principals more aware of how important it is to report the use of copyrighted content in schools.

 

Demystifying the process

Our goal is to help them understand the reasons behind the reporting process.

Some people in the education sector wrongly believe they’ll be penalized if they admit to using copyrighted content. In truth, it’s definitely allowed as long as the parameters of the ministry licensing agreement are respected!

There’s an easy-to-apply limit on use: up to 15% of each copyrighted work.

The agreement even allows unlimited use of some of types of content:

• Unpublished plays
• Live in-class reading of picture books
• Content displayed on smartboards

Copibec has prepared a video (in French) on how to report this type of in-class use: Tutoriel déclarations TNI et intranet (vidéo)

 

How the FQDE is helping

The federation is lending a hand by reaching out to their target clientele, starting with a survey to find out what principals already know about Copibec.

We hope to have the opportunity to promote SAMUEL and DONA, our digital platforms for the education sector.

We’re also putting together some frequently asked questions with answers about the reporting process.

 

Promoting locally created content

Another benefit of this collaboration is that it helps us fulfill our mission of fostering the creation of original content, in line with the spirit of the Copyright Act.

We can do so by facilitating access to copyrighted content and, at the same time, showcasing the authors, publishers, visual artists who create it.