The reverberations from yesterday’s Supreme Court of Canada copyright decisions will be felt for years (good coverage of the decisions include posts from Mark Hayes, IP Osgoode, Barry Sookman, Howard Knopf, the Toronto Star, and the CBC). While much of the coverage has focused on the music downloading issue, the continued expansion of fair dealing is perhaps the most significant development.

I focused on the court’s expansive view of fair dealing in an earlier post, but I think it is worth digging a bit deeper to ask whether Canada has now effectively shifted from fair dealing to fair use. The Copyright Act obviously still speaks of fair dealing, but the expansion by the courts and the legislature may have effectively rendered it very close to fair use.

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