Copyright Guide: Fair Dealing

Fair Dealing

The Fair Dealing exception in the Canadian Copyright Act permits use of a copyright protected work without permission or payment of copyright royalties. These two questions set out the factors when considering if a copy meets Fair Dealing:

1. Is your copy for a 'Fair Dealing' purpose?
2. Is the nature of the copy 'Fair'

Fair Dealing Purposes

Fair dealing exceptions , according to the Copyright Act, are:

Fair Nature of Copy

Factors to consider when determining if the usage is 'fair':

	More fair  Less fair
Purpose:	Educational, charitable	Commercial
Character of the dealing:	Single copy, limited distribution, one-off	Multiple copies, widely distributed, repetitive
Importance/amount of work copied:	Short excerpt, trivial amount	Entire work, significant amount
Effect of dealing on original work:	No detriment to original	Competing with original work
Nature of the work:	Unpublished, in public interest	Confidential
Available alternatives:	No alternatives, necessary for purpose	Non-copyright works available; not necessary

'Short Excerpts'

The fair dealing advisory defines a short excerpt as:

• up to 10 per cent of a copyright-protected work (including a literary work musical score, sound recording, and an audiovisual work)
• one chapter from a book
• a single article from a periodical publication
• an entire individual artistic work (including a painting, print, photograph, diagram, drawing, map, chart, or plan)
• an entire newspaper article or page
• an entire single poem or musical work from a publication containing other poems or musical scores
• an entire entry from an encyclopedia, annotated bibliography, dictionary, or similar reference work

provided that in each case no more of the work is copied than is required in order to achieve the allowable purpose

Summary

It is not necessary that usage satisfies each factor to be 'fair'; no one factor is determinative by itself. In assessing whether your use is fair, a court would look at the factors as a whole to determine if, on balance, the use is fair

If, having taken into account these considerations, the use can be characterized as ‘fair’ and it was for the purpose of research, private study, education, satire, parody, criticism, review or news reporting, then it should fall within the fair dealing exception and will not require permission from the copyright owner

--Adapted from the University of Waterloo Copyright Advisory Committee, licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence.--

See the Mount Allison University Copyright - Fair Dealing Policy (policy #5320)

Usage Not Considered 'Fair Dealing'?

If the copy is not considered Fair Dealing, check whether use is covered under:

• Any other Copyright Act   exception
• Library licences for e-resources (Note: e-resource licences supersede copyright)
• Cinematograph film licenses
• Any other agreement

Unsure the copy falls under fair dealing?

• Ask for confirmation!
  • Send the citation details to nbsam@mta.ca 

Seek permissions 

MtA Fair Dealing Policy