Archive for February 26th, 2014

Copyright Board of Canada on Copying a Few Pages: It’s Insubstantial and Not Compensable

The Copyright Board of Canada has issued a series of questions  to Access Copyright in the tariff proceedings involving Canadian post-secondary institutions. Once Canada universities and colleges quit the proceedings, the Board was left to play a more aggressive role in questioning Access Copyright’s claims.  Its questions focus on several important issues (discussed further below), but perhaps most noteworthy is its preliminary conclusion on what constitutes insubstantial or de minimis copying.  

In establishing the scope of copyright rights, the law refers to “the sole right to produce or reproduce the work or any substantial part thereof.”  Since the rights only arise once the full work or a substantial part of it are used, anything less than that – ie. an insubstantial part – is not subject to the rights identified in the Copyright Act. While some rights holders have argued that the standard for a substantial is very low (the National Post recently argued in a case that “even the reproduction of a small number of words in a newspaper article can be an impermissible reproduction”), the Copyright Board says that its preliminary view is that “copying of a few pages or a small percentage from a book that is not a collection of short works, such as poems, is not substantial.” With respect to the tariff application, the Board says this excludes more than 2.5% of coursepack copying. 

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February 26, 2014 4 comments News