The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) advances five arguments in support of these objections:
http://thepublicindex.org/docs/amended_settlement/CAUT_objection.pdf
The PASA puts the United States in violation of international intellectual property law and specifically in violation of trade agreements among Canada, the United States, and other parties as those agreements relate to copyright.
The PASA wrongly singles out Canadians for inclusion amongst the Author sub-class. The Canadian copyright regime is distinct from American copyright law in ways that will implicate Google and potentially the Book Registry in liability for copyright infringement in Canada, particularly with respect to Canada’s legislative provisions in respect of moral rights and its licensing scheme for unlocatable copyright owners (what Americans call “orphan works”), neither of which have correlatives in US law.
The PASA’s inclusion of Canadians in the Author sub-class is wrong for a second reason: the PASA does not account for the reality of Québecois and Canadian French-language authors among the Author sub-class. Québec, unlike other Provinces and Territories of Canada, is a civil law jurisdiction, and commercial dealings with copyrighted works reflect what we call a civilian view of the author. The PASA has generated a great deal of discontent among French language authors and CAUT’s Québec members.
The Authors Guild and the representative plaintiffs do not fairly and adequately represent the interests of Canadian academic authors in negotiating the PASA. Simply, many Canadian academics would not likely select a mechanism resembling that articulated in the PASA for distributing digital books. Academic authors in general place a higher premium on access than is reflected in the PASA.
The PASA includes minimal privacy protections. The PASA’s inconsiderate treatment of privacy interests is inconsistent with Canadian academic values. More troubling, the PASA’s failure to require privacy guarantees puts the PASA at odds with Canadian privacy legislation and values more generally.
