Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week is an annual celebration of the important doctrines of fair use and fair dealing. It is designed to highlight and promote the opportunities presented by fair use and fair dealing, celebrate successful stories, and explain these doctrines.
This year, to celebrate Fair Dealing Week, the Lower Mainland Copyright Consortium (CapU, Douglas, JIBC, SFU, and UBC) and the Alberta Copyright Consortium (U of A, U of C, MRU and NAIT) will be co-hosting an online event on Wednesday, February 23. See below for details and registration link. Also, visit https://fair-dealing.ca/ for more information on fair dealing in Canada and links to other events.
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Time: 1000-1100 Pacific (1100-1200 Mountain) Speaker: Dr. Carys J. Craig, Associate Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University Presentation: Best Practices for OER in Canada: A Fresh Look at Fair Dealing for Educational Use In this session, Dr. Carys Craig will speak about the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Educational Resources, focusing on Appendix 3: Educational Fair Dealing in Canada (which she authored for the Code). Dr. Craig will put these Canadian Best Practices into context: from a comparative perspective, she will explain how they align with US fair use for OER; from a Canadian policy perspective, she will show how their substance is informed by the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on copyright balance and user rights, which culminated in last year’s important York University v. Access Copyright ruling. |
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Time: 1200-1300 Pacific (1300-1400 Mountain) Speaker: Dr. Meera Nair, Copyright Specialist, Northern Alberta Institute of Technology Presentation: Fair Dealing’s future – artificial intelligence or willful ignorance? Following a review of Canada’s Copyright Act in 2018, the then-Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology stated that “facilitating the informational analysis of lawfully acquired copyrighted content could help Canada’s promising future in artificial intelligence to become reality,” and recommended the Act be amended as necessary to support this vision. Notably, the Committee also recommended altering Fair Dealing so that it operates as an illustrative exception. Such a change would not only support the needs of the artificial intelligence sector but also enable Canada to better foster creativity and ingenuity in the future. Yet the present government did not act on those recommendations; instead, it sought further consultation. Such unease or unwillingness to see merit in robust exceptions is not new. Disapproval of legitimate, unauthorized use of protected material is as old as the mechanism of copyright itself. This despite that copyright’s own history confirms that spaces for unauthorized copying facilitate the development of lucrative industries and can foster creativity. But from the 19th century on, Canada has not been able to frame copyright purely to Canadian advantage. Forces outside and inside the country routinely ensured that Canadian governments were resistant to exceptions, to the detriment of students, innovators, authors, artists, musicians, people with perceptual disabilities, consumers—said another way, to the detriment of all Canadians. If Canada continues along the path it has traditionally followed, where exceptions take a back seat to unnecessarily expansive control over the use of protected work, our “promising future” in AI may prove to be illusory. |
