Michael Geist

With the start of the school year less than two weeks away, the Canadian education community is increasingly thinking about copyright and the implications of Bill C-11 and the Supreme Court of Canada’s five copyright decisions. While Access Copyright argues that little has changed (in recent correspondence to the Copyright Board it even objected to a six-month delay in formulating a school survey on copying practices to fully account for Bill C-11 and the decisions), most recognize that the law has undergone a dramatic change that confirms significant flexibilities for educational uses.

I’ve posted several pieces on these issues (fair use in Canada, technological neutrality, impact on Access Copyright), but given the ongoing efforts to mislead and downplay the implications of the decisions, this long post pulls together the Supreme Court’s own language on how to assess fair dealing. The quotes come directly from the three major fair dealing decisions: CCH Canadian, Access Copyright, and SOCAN v. Bell Canada.

Note that this post is limited to the Court’s decisions and does not focus on the changes in Bill C-11. The legislative reforms provide additional support for education as they include the expansion of fair dealing to include education as a purposes category, a cap of $5000 on statutory damages for all non-commercial infringement, a non-commercial user generated content provision, an education exception for publicly available on the Internet, a new exception for public performances in schools, and a technology-neutral approach for the reproduction of materials for display purposes that may apply both offline and online.

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