Fair Dealing Week at McMaster

It’s a new year at McMaster and a new year for copyright at McMaster. Towards the end of 2015, McMaster became the most recent Canadian university to end its licence agreement with Access Copyright, a copyright collective that provides licences to make copies from print and digital works such as books, magazines, newspapers and journals.

Due to fairly recent changes in Canadian copyright law, an emerging consensus among Canadian universities, legal experts and copyright academics, arose around the limited use of copyright material for educational purposes, without requiring permission or payment of royalties. For universities and colleges, this would mean that an Access Copyright licence would no longer be required when distributing a reasonable amount of a work for the purpose of education at non-profit educational institutions.

However what does opting out of an Access Copyright License really mean? By terminating the Access Copyright license, Access Copyright fees associated with course packs both printed and digital have been removed. The Custom Courseware department can also include many McMaster Library e-journal articles and e-book selections in courseware at no charge. These savings, which are passed down to students, make the Campus Store, through Media Production Services, the lowest cost for courseware printing on campus. It also means that the fair dealing provisions of the Copyright Modernization Act and the University’s Fair Dealing Policy allow the Campus Store, faculty, staff and students to use short excerpts of copyright-protected works without remitting royalties to copyright holders.

To hear about the latest copyright information, news and events please follow @MACCopyright on Twitter and/or go to www.copyright.mcmaster.ca