Jaywalking, littering, the “California Stop“… if I had to guess, I’d say that you’ve probably broken at least one of these laws this year already!

For those who are curious: jaywalking is illegal in BC under the Motor Vehicle Act, sec. 179(2); littering is illegal in BC under the Litter Act, sec. 3; and the rolling stop is illegal in BC under the Motor Vehicle Act, sec. 186.

But I think that one of the most easily broken laws has everything to do with copyright. In the days before Netflix and YouTube and GenAI, breaking copyright looked something like bootleg copies of movies, which usually came with an FBI pre-roll ad that looked something like this:

An FBI anti-piracy warning screen. (Reproduced under fair dealing by LogoRedux50)

I cited the sections in which those other “pesky” laws are illegal in BC. Copyright law, however, isn’t as straightforward as “don’t do this” or “don’t do that”. If it was, then UVic wouldn’t need its own Copyright Office!

In my personal experience, copyright law seems to find the most tension when it comes to university textbooks and literature. As a French major, it was difficult at times for the bookstore to secure copies of required texts in French, even recently published Canadian works!

Out of necessity, we were able to secure one copy of the book and then created multiple photocopies of the entire book at Zap (while no one who worked there was looking); but according to both UVic policy and copyright law, we would have exceeded our copyright restrictions by 90%.

But if the laws are so stringent that notices like these are on our photocopiers around campus, yet methods like photocopying whole books and accessing textbooks off of “those sites” (if you know, you know) are so widespread, why hasn’t this been a larger conversation?

Of course, this hasn’t been without its attempts: from constantly pumping out newer editions of the same textbook which limits second-hand purchasing to creating digital-only modules under the guise of “innovation” in the textbook industry, it seems like companies are trying their hardest to monopolize the system.

Perhaps that’s the problem. Maybe it’s an open secret that students and instructors alike are skirting these laws both in the interest of survival and to send a message to the publishers that they’re able to read between the lines: that the “innovation” is actually greed.

At the end of the day, copyright is important for independent artists and creators to ensure that their hard work isn’t stolen by those who have nothing to lose, yet the system has time and time again favoured those who had nothing to lose in the first place.