← BACK TO LEARNING COMMONS PAGE
Learning Commons
Learning Commons
Learning Commons
The information in this guide is not intended as legal advice. It is designed to assist faculty, students and staff in determining best practices and simplify the complex issue of Copyright.
It provides guidance about your rights and responsibilities concerning copyright as they pertain to research and education.
College of the Rockies is currently operating under the Canadian Copyright Act, Access Copyright's College Premium Licence Agreement and its Permissions and has adopted the Association of Canadian Community Colleges (ACCC's) Fair Dealing Policy.
What is copyright?
The Canadian Copyright Act is a federal statute governing the use and reproduction of intellectual property in Canada and protecting the rights of creators. As stated in the Act , “copyright, in relation to a work, means the sole right to produce or reproduce the work or any substantial part thereof in any material form whatever, to perform the work or any substantial part thereof in public or, if the work is unpublished, to publish the work or any substantial part thereof."
In Canada, a work is protected by copyright from the moment of creation and lasts for the life of the creator plus 50 years. After that, it becomes 'public domain'.
Access Copyright is the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency which licences educational institutions across Canada to copy (both print and digital) portions of published works for day-to-day classroom use and for the production of course packs, while still protecting the rights of the copyright owners.
Fair Dealing, Sections 29, 29.1, and 29.2 of the Copyright Act is a user's right permitting use, or "dealing", with a copyright-protected work without permission of the copyright holder or payment of copyright royalties. The dealing must be for an allowable purpose and must be fair.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Some content in this guide has been adapted from copyright guides at