Understanding copyright

Copyright is one of the four branches of Intellectual Property; the others include patents, trademarks, and industrial design. In Canada, the law that governs copyright is the Canadian Copyright Act.

Copyright is just that—it means the right to copy a work. The Copyright Act provides for both creator and user rights. As an author or creator of a work, you will automatically assume all rights to your work once the work is enshrined in a fixed format such as an article, photograph, or sound recording to name a few.

As a student, the copyright for any work product that you create during your studies, such as an essay, belongs to you for a designated period of time. This time period, or copyright term, lasts for your entire life to the end of that calendar year plus another 50 years. (Recently this term has been extended by another 20 years as a result of compliance to trade agreements and will come into effect/enforcement in 2022.) During this time you, and your estate get to control how your work is reproduced and distributed by others and you have economic rights to earn a living from your work.

Copyright is automatic and includes a set of moral rights that cannot be waived unless, in some cases as explicitly assigned by you. These moral rights include the right of association, to be named as author of the work, and the right to the integrity of the work so it cannot be adapted without your permission.

Copyright infringement can happen, knowingly or otherwise, when another party is reproducing or distributing your work without your permission. There can be severe financial penalties as a consequence to an infringement scenario.

There are various exceptions in the Copyright Act that allow others some rights in some cases to use your work in certain ways without needing to obtain formal permission. These are referred to as users rights. The exceptions that will most likely apply to you during the course of your studies are Fair Dealing, which allows some copying of work to a certain degree without having to obtain formal permission for the purposes of research, private study, education, parody or satire. Other copyright exceptions that you may use may involve activities associated with copying for your own personal private, noncommercial use or when creating content that might include bits of published or publicly available existing content in the creation of a new work. This type of copying generally does not require formal permission be sought provided that it is not being used for commercial purposes and that attribution is given to the rightsholder.

Further to these user exceptions, the Copyright Act also provides various bodies, such as schools, libraries, and archives with some additional exceptions to infringement as well as for folks with perceptual disabilities.

For more information on copyright, please contact us at copyright@athabascau.ca.