Thursday 1 December 2011

Fair dealing in Canada

Often people are hired to create window designs.
THis is intellectual property, too.

What is "fair dealing" - Copyright Law 9 Sep 2008 ... What kinds of uses are legal in the United States under fair use but not clearly legal in Canada under fair dealing?
FAIR DEALING IN CANADA The Canadian Copyright Act (R.S.C. 1985)
What is "fair dealing (Canada)""fair use (US)"?

In Canada, the principal exception to the exclusive rights of copyright holders is called "fair dealing". Fair dealing creates a limited number of exceptions, including private study, research, criticism, review and news reporting. This list is exhaustive, such that fair dealing applies only to those categories of dealings that are specifically mentioned.

The equivalent user right under American copyright law, "fair use," is, by contrast, an open-ended system which adopts a non-exhaustive approach to categories of dealings, and focuses instead on principles for determining whether a use strikes an equitable balance between user and copyright holder interests. These principles include, but are not limited to:
  • determinations of the purpose and character of the use; 
  • the nature of the work; 
  • the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the entire work; 
  • the effect of the derived work on the market for the original. 
Fair dealing relies on similar fairness principles, but only within the scope of the itemized categories of dealings. The term fair use is thus more expansive than fair dealing and the terms should not be used interchangeably.



Acts Undertaken without Motive of Gain


 (1) No action referred to in section 29.4, 29.5, 30.2 or 30.21 may be carried out with motive of gain.

What happens with many media, is that they take a YouTube video, put an ad in front, and credit YouTube, rather than the person who created the video. This is just plain wrong.

You can read my story of theft of my entire video from a TV news outlet.



I was ruminating on my blog designs. Having taught web design to elementary students, I thought long and hard about it. I have several blogs: one for my book, this one for my personal writing, one for educational resources. I wanted to be very clear about the goals and the purpose of each. I don't want to confound my book information with Ontario Senior Health information, for example.

Plagiarism and Copyright

Plagiarism and copyright: I have written about at length, and yet it still needs to be said. There are some bloggers finding that they are prone to theft of their intellectual property. This include images and written content of all kinds. Sam, in Singapore, created a succinct post on this. He also told me to visit: Copyscape, to determine if your site has been plagiarized.

PUBLIC DOMAIN DOES NOT MEAN YOU CAN USE ANYTHING YOU FIND. PROTECT YOURSELF: WATCH FOR PLAGIARISM.


This blog post gives the writer some guidelines. Both images, and text  are copywritten. "Public domain" is a concept that a lot of people throw around without truly understanding it. "Public domain" does not mean the same thing as "on the Web" or even "publicly available." In fact, the fact that a work is online or publicly available is no indication whatsoever of whether it is in the public domain. Fair Use (US) and Fair Practice means you can use snippets to promote another site, but not copy it whole.

Materials That a Company Licenses to You
I.E., Microsoft: Media Elements and Templates. You may have access to media images, clip art, animations, sounds, music, shapes, video clips, templates and other forms of downloadable content ("media elements") associated with the service. If so, you may copy and use the media elements, and license, display and distribute them, along with your modifications as part of your software products, including your web sites, but you may not (i) sell, license or distribute copies of the media elements by themselves or as part of any collection, or product if the primary value of the product is in the media elements; (ii) grant customers of your product any rights to license or distribute the media elements; (iii) license or distribute any of the media elements that include representations of identifiable individuals, governments, logos, initials, emblems, trademarks, or entities for any commercial purposes or to express or imply any endorsement or association with any product, entity, or activity; or (iv) create obscene or scandalous works, as defined by law at the time the work is created, using the media elements.

Public Domain Clipart
when cats fly @ Bayshore Mall, 2010

     A lot of black and white clipart is classified as public domain, which means its original copyright is no longer in effect, and it can be used by the public freely and without penalty.  In general, this situation covers works created before 1923.  There are piles of free and inexpensive public domain clipart available on the internet.  The challenge lies in determining its authenticity

Several online sources of free public domain clipart that you might want to check out. Always read the "Terms of Use" or "License" page on any free site.  If there is no guarantee that all items are in the public domain, then some of a site's images could have been gleaned and added without verifying its copyright status.

Some other helpful sites