Locked Out: An Empirical Study of the Impacts of Technological Protection Measures on Digital Content Access in Canadian Academic Libraries

This report presents findings from a comprehensive empirical qualitative study involving interviews with Canadian academic librarians, copyright officers, and information professionals to examine how TPMs affect digital content access. The research reveals that TPMs are deeply embedded within the technology and licensing frameworks used by libraries, creating opaque barriers to lawful access. Practitioners often lack clarity on whether restrictions stem from TPMs or from contractual or platform design, complicating their ability to support fair dealing uses of works, preservation, and teaching. This ambiguity has increased substantially with the rise of controlled digital lending (CDL) and other access models that have accelerated since the COVID-19 pandemic. The study documents how this ambiguity leads to caution, workarounds, and self-censorship, even when legal rights exist. These findings highlight significant challenges in reforming content TPM policy within Canadian copyright law and underscore the need for legislative and regulatory clarity to support equitable access to scholarly and cultural materials.