Copyright Series by University of Ottawa Prof Michael Geist "Misleading on Fair Dealing"

On his blog, University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist has started a series dealing with misconceptions that he states publishers and rights-holding organizations have been disseminating about fair dealing.

Fair dealing is an exception allowed under the Copyright Act. It allows use of limited portions of a copyright protected work without permission or payment of copyright royalties for purposes such as  research, private study, education, satire, parody, criticism, review or news reporting.

In the first part of the series, Prof. Geist explains:

"Fair dealing has unsurprisingly emerged as one of the dominant topics of the ongoing Canadian copyright review. While educational institutions maintain that spending on content has increased since the 2012 reforms that added education to the list of fair dealing purposes, Access Copyright and the publishing community argue that licensing revenues have declined. Starting today, I’ll be posting a series on fair dealing that unpack many of the issues and demonstrate why House of Commons committees studying the issue may have been misled by exaggerated and inaccurate claims."

"The series starts with the foundational argument from Access Copyright and its supporters, namely that current educational practices are the result of the 2012 copyright reforms that led to a significant expansion of fair dealing. The implication is that the government broke their compensation system in 2012 and should “fix it” by curtailing educational use of fair dealing. Future posts will explain why licensing has actually increased since 2012, but this post is limited to the oft-heard claim that the 2012 reforms are to “blame” for current educational practices."

Part 2 of the series published yesterday is entitled Why Access Copyright’s Claim of 600 Million Uncompensated Copies Doesn’t Add Up.

Part 3 published today is entitled Data Shows Books Are Rapidly Declining as Part of Coursepack Materials.