4 million class action lawsuit against Université Laval for

NEWS RELEASE
$4 MILLION CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT AGAINST UNIVERSITÉ LAVAL FOR
COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT
Montreal, November 10, 2014
Copibec has filed a motion in Quebec Superior Court for authorization to launch a class action on
behalf of thousands of authors and publishers from Quebec, the rest of Canada and other
countries around the world because their copyright protected works have been copied without
permission by Université Laval.
On an annual basis, the Quebec City-based university copies more than 11 million pages from
7,000 different works published in Quebec, the rest of Canada or abroad and includes them in
coursepacks sold to students or distributes them online via its secure internal computer network.
Until May 2014, Université Laval, like all other Quebec universities, held a comprehensive
licence issued by Copibec allowing it to make those copies legally. However, the university’s
board of directors decided not to renew its licence and on May 21, 2014 put into effect a policy
concerning the use of third-party works for teaching, learning, research and private study
purposes (“Politique et directives relatives à l’utilisation de l’œuvre d’autrui aux fins des
activités d’enseignement, d’apprentissage, de recherche et d’étude privée à l’Université Laval”).
That policy now lets professors, lecturers, instructors and researchers make copies of copyright
protected works and excerpts from those works without the university having to obtain
permission from each author and publisher or pay the required royalties. Université Laval is the
only educational institution in Quebec acting in that way.
Copibec, whose official name is the Société québécoise de gestion collective des droits de
reproduction, is a not-for-profit created in 1998 by the Union des écrivaines et écrivains
québécois (UNEQ) and the Association nationale des éditeurs de livres (ANEL) to manage the
reproduction rights for copyright protected works in print and digital formats. It has the authority
to manage the reproduction rights of 2,330 publishers and 24,295 authors from Quebec as well as
the authors and publishers represented by reproduction rights organizations in 32 countries,
including France, Belgium and the United States.
On behalf of the authors and publishers whose works were copied without permission by
Université Laval, Copibec intends to ask the Superior Court to issue orders so that the illegal
copying can be stopped and the illegally copied material can be seized. It also intends to ask the
Court to sentence Université Laval to pay those authors and publishers approximately $2 million
in unpaid royalties, $1 million in moral damages and $1 million in punitive damages in addition
to the profits earned on the sale of coursepacks to students.
-30Since the case is before the courts, Copibec’s representatives will not be giving interviews about
the class action. For more information, please contact Copibec’s legal counsel in this case, Daniel
Payette, at 418-837-2521.