Copyright and its Significance for Higher Education

In higher education, you’ve most likely encountered copyright when selecting and securing resources to assign students in a course, or to secure permissions, such as an image, for one of your own scholarly publications.

Intellectual property is the term used for rights – established by law – that empower creators to restrict others from using their creative works.

A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy and distribute a creative work, usually for a limited time. This generally limits how others may access and use the original works of creators — works spanning the spectrum from novels and operas, corporate manuals, archives, cat videos, to scribbles on a napkin. Normally, the first owner of a copyright will be the individual person that created a work.

There are limits to copyright. Canadian higher education and other domains such as news and comedy, rely on fair dealing. Fair Dealing is an exception to copyright infringement, and is also referred to as a user’s right (as opposed to an owner’s right). Fair dealing provides balance between the rights of owners and users. To qualify under the fair dealing exception, the dealing must be for research, private study, education, parody, satire, criticism or review and news reporting, and the dealing must be considered fair as per the criteria established by the Supreme Court of Canada.

As a student or instructor, you have likely encountered fair dealing when negotiating or making use of library reserves, electronic or otherwise. This course reserve application of fair use broadens access to materials while abiding by copyright law. It is important to note the fair dealing guidelines are not outlined within law. Instead, information and legal professionals interpret the fair dealing defense in order to make recommendations about the fair use of copyrighted works.

At KPU, we understand fair dealing to mean the sharing of a single, short excerpt from a copyright-protected work to each student enrolled in a class or course. For more detailed information about what this might look like in practice, please visit: https://libguides.kpu.ca/copyright/fairdealing

While we may understand the owner of a copyright to typically be the person that created a work, in the context of higher education, and the workplace more generally, this may not always hold true. The exclusive rights granted by copyright can be transferred to others, including legal entities such as corporations, publishers or universities. Understanding who controls the exclusive rights granted by copyright is necessary in order to understand who has authority to grant permissions to others to reuse the work (e.g., adding a CC license to the work). It is important to note that the author of a work may not necessarily be the copyright holder.

For these reasons, navigating copyright issues can be frustrating to the point of causing anxiety, potentially discouraging or inhibiting legitimate uses of copyright-protected materials, like use within a classroom.
To help ease this anxiety, navigate through the interactive activity below and identify if you own your intellectual property (IP) for creative works you produce under your employment at KPU. Remember, if you do own your IP, you can openly license your work. More on open licenses later.