Amendment to the Access Copyright Licensing Agreement at Western

(Originally posted March 24th, 2012)

An amendment to the recent Access Copyright licensing agreement sheds some light on the fee recalculation and rebate issued to Western students. Please find it here: Addendum to License Agreement letter (Jan 30)

We have been having a hard time understanding why the university was issuing rebate cheques in the face of such a large royalty increase. Initially, we explored the idea that the university may have raised the fee in anticipation of the forthcoming licensing agreement, then issued rebate cheques when the fee turned out to be lower than expected. However, it was never clear if this was actually the case.

This amendment explains that the royalties section, which increases the FTE fee to $27.50, shall be deleted from the licensing agreement and replaced with the text of this amendment in consideration of the universities willingness to settle with Access Copyright.

The amendment states that the royalty for the period from January 2011 to April 2011, and thru to April 30 2012, shall be calculated at the much lower rate of the previous agreement rather than $27.50. The previous licensing agreement rate was $3.38 per FTE and 10 cents per page for course packs. This seems to indicate why rebates were issued by the university.

While the licensing agreement and this amendment are publicly available from the Copyright Board, the university choose not to release them at any point. Western’s failure to make this information available to the larger university community is troubling and seems to suggest some deceptiveness on the part of the university.

Alan Kilpatrick