What follows is full text of an invitation to BC academics for today:

The Faculty Association of Simon Fraser University (SFUFA)
–and–
The University of British Columbia Faculty Association (UBCFA)
Present:
Access Copyright (Not!):
Obstructing Teaching and Learning at Canadian Universities

Do you know what “Access Copyright” is and how it affects or impinges on your day-to-day work? Do you have issues or disputes with copyright laws/rules and how they are being implemented? Are we being intimidated into a narrowing of the definition of “fair dealing”? Join us for a discussion of these topics:

Friday April 11, 2008 at 1:00 PM
SFU Harbour Center Room 1430
(515 West Hastings St. Vancouver)

Our guest speaker will be Dr. Sam Trosow, an associate professor at the University of Western Ontario who holds dual academic appointments in the faculties of law and information and media studies, Dr. Trosow has joined CAUT as the association’s 2007-2008 visiting scholar. One of Trosow’s primary actions at CAUT is to bolster advocacy efforts to ensure any reform of the federal Copyright Act reflects the concerns of the academic community.
SFUFA and UBCFA thank CAUT for their generous support of this event.

That’s the text. I’ve been trying to unpack it ever since it was sent to me.

Now SFU and UBC have licenses with Access Copyright to cover their uses of copyright material. The licenses are negotiated by the two sides as to what they cover and what the cost should be, with the option of an appeal to the Copyright Board if either side feels the other side is not bargaining in good faith. Is any faculty member inconvenienced by that? Does any faculty member incur any cost or “intimidation” by their employers’ agreements with Access Copyright?

UBC and SFU are large organizations, with lots of money, lots of lawyers, lots of connections to power. It is difficult to see them being intimidated by one single licensing collective, with perhaps one-millionth of the universities’ revenues. So why do they need CAUT or the faculty associations to rush to their defence?

Now it is true that UBC and SFU could save money if they did not license rights and pay licensing fees to the
collective. But how is that a concern of CAUT or the faculty associations? Have these somehow become company unions, the employees shilling for the boss?

More deeply, why are salaried professors so opposed to having universities actually respect intellectual property. They know how eager university administrations are to undermine the independence of faculty, to appropriate their teaching, to repackage and sell it for the university’s benefit. Surely CAUT and the faculty associations should be defending the rights of faculty members to own and control how their own intellectual work is used. And one way to advance that agenda is to stand in solidarity with other who create the intellectual work that the university enterprise depends upon. Instead we seem to see CAUT and the faculty associations rushing to emphasize their dependent position, to emphasize that faculty are employees, that their status as scholars and intellectuals depends on their employment status and their loyalty to the boss, adn their willingness to give away their own work in exchange for being able (as a condition of employment) to take the work of others.

Pity.