Copyright & Fair Dealing

Use of copyright-protected materials by Trent University students, staff and faculty must comply with the Canadian Copyright Act and Trent University's Use of Copyrighted Material Guidelines.

Trent University's guidelines are based on the Fair Dealing Policy for Universities developed by Universities Canada. 

If you have any questions about copyright and fair dealing, please email the Library's copyright team at copyright@trentu.ca.

Section 29.4 of the Copyright Act covers exceptions for Educational Institutions, including:

• 29.4(1): It is not an infringement of copyright for an educational institution or a person acting under its authority for the purposes of education or training on its premises to reproduce a work, or do any other necessary act, in order to display it.
  • This includes reproduction on whiteboards, chalkboards, overheads, projected slides

• 29.4(2): It is not an infringement of copyright for an educational institution or a person acting under its authority to

  (a) reproduce, translate or perform in public on the premises of the educational institution, or

  (b) communicate by telecommunication to the public situated on the premises of the educational institution 

  a work or other subject-matter as required for a test or examination.

The exemption from copyright infringement provided by subsections (1) and (2) does not apply if the work or other subject-matter is commercially available (available on the Canadian market within a reasonable time and for a reasonable price and may be located with reasonable effort) in a medium that is appropriate for the purposes referred to in those subsections.

Section 29.5 of the Copyright Act includes exceptions for performances in educational settings.

It is not an infringement of copyright for an educational institution or a person acting under its authority to do the following acts if they are done on the premises of an educational institution for educational or training purposes and not for profit, before an audience consisting primarily of students of the educational institution, instructors acting under the authority of the educational institution or any person who is directly responsible for setting a curriculum for the educational institution:

(a) the live performance in public, primarily by students of the educational institution, of a work;

(b) the performance in public of a sound recording, or of a work or performer’s performance that is embodied in a sound recording, as long as the sound recording is not an infringing copy or the person responsible for the performance has no reasonable grounds to believe that it is an infringing copy;

(c) the performance in public of a work or other subject-matter at the time of its communication to the public by telecommunication; and

(d) the performance in public of a cinematographic work, as long as the work is not an infringing copy or the person responsible for the performance has no reasonable grounds to believe that it is an infringing copy.

Section 30.04 of the Copyright Act permits the reuse of material publicly available on the internet, provided certain conditions are met:

• The work is a non-infringing copy, legally obtained, without digital locks or visible notices preventing or prohibiting sharing and reuse
• The purpose of the use is education or training
• The audience consists primarily of students on the premises of an educational institution
• The copy includes attribution including source, author, performer, creator, broadcaster if applicable.

Fair Dealing is the end user's right, in certain situations, to copy a short excerpt from a copyright-protected work without permission from or payment to the copyright owner. This is an exception in Canada's Copyright Act to read more about Canada's fair dealing see sections 29, the Copyright Act.

However the Copyright Act does not define fairness. Fair dealing is context-specific and depends on the facts of each case. Six fair dealing criteria to be considered in assessing fairness are purpose, character, amount, alternatives available, nature, and effect. Trent University's Use of Copyrighted Material Guidelines contains more details on the six fair dealing criteria.  

A short excerpt means:

• 10% or less of a work, or 
• No more than:
  • One chapter of a book;
  • A single article from a periodical;
  • An entire artistic work, including a painting, print, photograph, diagram, drawing, map, chart or plan from a work containing other artistic works;
  • An entire newspaper article or page from a newspaper;
  • An entire single poem or musical score from a work containing other poems or musical scores;
  • an entire entry from an encyclopedia, annotated bibliography, dictionary or similar reference work.

The short excerpt must contain no more of the work than is required in order to achieve the fair dealing purpose. Multiple short excerpts from the same copyright­-protected work, with the intention of copying or communicating substantially the entire work, is prohibited.

A single copy of a short excerpt from a copyrighted work may be provided or communicated to each student registered in a course.

Trent University Library & Archives provides course reading support through a tool called Leganto that links readings from your syllabus directly to your Blackboard course. You can email your course reading list to library@trentu.ca to help your students get their readings from the library. For more details about course reading support refer to the library's Course Reading Support webpage. If you have general questions about fair dealing, email the library's copyright team at copyright@trentu.ca.  

• Fair Dealing Decision Tool: Council of Ministers of Education, Canada
• Fair Dealing Policy for Universities: Universities Canada
• Canadian Copyright Term & Public Domain Flow Chart: University of Alberta