Open Education, Artificial Intelligence, and Copyright: Welcome to Fair Dealing Week 2022

This blog post was written by Sandra Maglanque, SFU Library co-op student

Fair Dealing Week is coming this February (February 21 - 25)!

Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week is a weeklong celebration of fair dealing, an essential part of copyright law that allows everyone to use copyrighted material for things such as research, teaching and art.

What is fair dealing anyway?

Fair dealing (which is different from the U.S copyright law of “fair use”) is a right that allows people to reproduce and “fairly” use copyrighted material without having to seek permission from copyright holders for various purposes.

For more information about fair dealing, the SFU Copyright Office has great resources about the topic like this post about fair dealing and copyright. SFU also has a Fair Dealing Policy that gives faculty, researchers and students guidelines for what uses and how much you can actually copy.

The SFU Copyright Office is also here to answer any questions you may have about fair dealing and copyright for teaching, learning, and research.

Fair Dealing Week Events:

This year, two online events will be hosted by various universities in the Lower Mainland (CapU, Douglas, JIBC, SFU, and UBC) and universities from Alberta (U of A, U of C, MRU and NAIT) on Wednesday (February 23) at 10am-11am and 12pm-1pm.

You can register for both these events at UBC's event page for Fair Dealing Week.

In the morning, Dr. Craig will be holding a talk about fair dealing in relation to Open Education Resources and how best practices are informed by the Supreme Court’s ruling on the York University v. Access Copyright case.

The Supreme Court rendered its judgment for the York University v. Access Copyright case in 2021, ruling in York University’s favour and dismissing the “mandatory tariff” that Access Copyright had wanted to enforce for use of copyrighted material. While the Supreme Court did not make a decision on York’s claim that their actions fell under fair dealing, there is the possibility that it may make a future decision on the subject. For more background on the case, Michael Geist’s 2020 blog analysis of the case makes for a quick and informative read.

For those interested in incorporating OERs to their classrooms, SFU Library has a number of resources to help you get started, and some helpful information for finding and evaluating OERs to make sure they suit your class’ needs. The SFU OER Working Group is also available for help, including presentations of OERs in action at SFU.

In the afternoon, Dr. Nair will be speaking about copyright and fair dealing within the field of artificial intelligence, following the 2018 recommendations made by the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology for the Copyright Act. These recommendations include altering current Fair Dealing laws so that it can better support the field of artificial intelligence and Canada’s future creativity. Dr. Nair writes extensively about her research and fair dealing at her website,“Fair Duty.”