Last month, I reported that Association of Canadian Community Colleges had received a legal opinion concluding that the Access Copyright model licence had “little value” for educational institutions. The opinion recommended that ACCC members not sign the Access Copyright model licence and that those operating under the Access Copyright interim tariff cease to do so. While it did not receive much attention, the same counsel also provided a model fair dealing policy. The policy does an effective job of demonstrating why the Access Copyright licence provides very little value to education as fair dealing covers much of what the copyright collective currently offers educational users.

The core elements of the model fair dealing policy include the following:

1. Teachers, instructors, professors and staff members in non-profit educational institutions may communicate and reproduce, in paper or electronic form, short excerpts from a copyright-protected work for the purposes of research, private study, criticism, review, news reporting, education, satire and parody.

2. Copying or communicating short excerpts from a copyright-protected work under this Fair Dealing Policy for the purpose of news reporting, criticism or review should mention the source and, if given in the source, the name of the author or creator of the work.

3. A single copy of a short excerpt from a copyright-protected work may be provided or communicated to each student enrolled in a class or course:
a. as a class handout
b. as a posting to a learning or course management system that is password 
protected or otherwise restricted to students of a school or post-secondary 
educational institution
c. as part of a course pack

4. A short excerpt means:
a. up to 10% of a copyright-protected work (including a literary work, musical score, sound recording, and an audiovisual work)
b. one chapter from a book
c. a single article from a periodical
d. an entire artistic work (including a painting, print, photograph, diagram, drawing, map, chart, and plan) from a copyright-protected work containing other artistic works
e. an entire newspaper article or page
f. an entire single poem or musical score from a copyright-protected work 
containing other poems or musical scores
g. an entire entry from an encyclopedia, annotated bibliography, dictionary or 
similar reference work

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