It is important to consider copyright and licensing conditions when creating and sharing digital materials. The following FAQs have been generously prepared by the members of the College Libraries Ontario (CLO) Copyright Interest Group to help library staff navigate these considerations.
Please also consult with in-house copyright or risk-management experts within your institution while making use of digitization and digital resource sharing functionality in Alma and Primo VE.
Copyright gives its owner the exclusive right to make copies of their creative works in any format. So, generally speaking, copyright prohibits making copies for digital lending.
However, copyright exceptions such as fair dealing in the Canadian Copyright Act allow educational institutions to make copies, in paper or digital form, within reasonable limits to support the teaching, learning and research activities of faculty, staff and students. Reasonable limits on aspects such as the amount copied and distribution are generally guided by the fair dealing policy of an institution.
Many CLO colleges have adopted CICan’s Fair Dealing Guidelines (refer to this handout for more information). However, be sure to check the fair dealing policy or guidelines of your institution. Also, a few colleges have a licence with Access Copyright that would guide their copying practices.
Please also consult with in-house copyright or risk-management experts within your institution while making use of digitization and digital resource sharing functionality in Alma and Primo VE.
Yes, there are exceptions such as:
Yes, a library may identify certain resources for exclusion due to factors like potential copyright risk and the demand impact on their services.
For example, high-demand resources such as textbooks on short-term loan or on reserve may not be feasible given the time and work required to take them off circulation to digitize. Also, there could be a higher risk to copy from commercial textbooks for cross-institutional digital lending. A library’s lending policies and workflow can also determine whether some materials should be excluded from the service.
These guardrails help ensure copyright compliance and mitigate misuse by patrons. Fair dealing is evaluated on a case-by-case basis so a patron should make a new request if they want to reuse the material in a different context (e.g., faculty requesting the same book chapter for another class). This helps a library to track statistics and monitor potential usage that falls outside of fair dealing. We also want to reduce the chance of the link to a digital copy being shared with someone who did not make the request or agree to the copyright acknowledgment statement in the system.
Libraries will need to monitor requests for copyright compliance and potential impact on workflow. For example, cumulative requests from a patron for different chapters from the same book likely fall outside of fair dealing (multiple chapters that exceed 10% of the book). In this case, the copyright expert at the college should be notified so they can reach out to the patron to investigate. Another example is multiple requests by different students for the same chapter of a book. While these requests may fall within fair dealing (a short excerpt for the educational use of students), they add to a library’s workload. If the chapter is required for a course, the faculty should be the one making the request and sharing the copy with students.
Libraries can also consider the number of items from a patron they can reasonably accept for their workflow and whether there should be a limit depending on the patron group (e.g., request limit for students may differ from the limit for faculty and staff).
Copyright free or public domain materials are those in which their copyright has expired (70 years after the passing of the creator) or the creators waived their copyright (e.g., images marked as public domain or CC0).
Copyright friendly or openly licensed materials are those in which the creators retain their copyright but have allowed people to copy, use and share their work under certain conditions. For example, open educational resources are typically available under a Creative Commons licence that permits their reuse and adaptation (refer to The Learning Portal’s OER Module for more information).
In the landmark Alberta v. Access Copyright (2012) case, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that under fair dealing, faculty may provide copies of excerpts of copyrighted works to facilitate the private study of their students. CICan’s Fair Dealing Guidelines have also provided guidelines to assist faculty in their teaching and facilitation of student learning. Generally speaking, faculty may share a copy obtained through digital lending or ILL with students in a course provided that access is limited to those students (a copy uploaded to a LMS with student-restricted access is acceptable). However, refer to your college’s fair dealing policy or Access Copyright licence for guidance.
This type of request is outside the scope of our guidelines for digitization. However, section 32 of the Copyright Act addresses some conditions under which it is permissible to create an alternate format. Additionally, institutions may undertake a detailed fair dealing analysis to determine whether the request is fair dealing.
Ultimately, we recommend contacting the staff at your college who are responsible for accessibility or using an alternate format database such as the Accessible Content E-Portal to assist in facilitating this request.
Note that digital sharing of licensed resources will be addressed in the next phase of the Digital Sharing project. At this time, licensed resources are not considered.
OCLS has maintained the CLEAR database, which identifies the permitted usage of the licensed resources that OCLS manages to support CLO libraries. For each resource, it answers questions including “Can I make a copy for use in an e-reserve system or a course management system?” and “Is ILL allowed?”
Your library may have resources that are not licensed through OCLS. Depending on whether your library has a local instance of CLEAR, these licences may not be included in CLEAR. Also, it is your library’s responsibility to check the licence terms of a resource when there is a question not answered by CLEAR.
The Learning Portal’s Copyright Learning Modules are an excellent resource to learn more about copyright, licensing and Creative Commons.
You may also find it helpful to ask how other libraries have handled a copyright issue through the CLO Copyright listserv (clo_cig@senecapolytechnic.ca), which is maintained by Joy Muller, Director of Libraries, Learning Centres and Test Centres at Seneca College.