fair dealing week 2018

Tomorrow marks the start of Fair Dealing Week for 2018. It is an opportunity to bring concentrated attention to this particular exception, which is practiced every day by Canadians in their pursuit of learning and  creative endeavor (i.e. see here and here).

Broadly speaking, exceptions are statutory provisions which provide the means by which one may engage in legitimate, unauthorized uses of copyright-protected material. Taken together, exceptions delineate the essential space in which the fundamental construct of the system survives—that, in order to foster creativity, the system must operate as a set of limited rights.

Fair dealing enables Canadians to continuously build the capacity for creative thought; capitalizing on that thought is managed through the rights of control found within the system of copyright. More precisely, exposure to copyrighted work facilitates creation of future work. But the elapsed time between these two stages of creative endeavor leaves fair dealing vulnerable, as the modest amounts copied under fair dealing are viewed as a threat to copyright owners’ well-being.

Worse, fair dealing is tarred by accusation that it is bringing about the demise of Canadian literature. Emotional arguments lacking logic coupled with selective data are paraded before Members of Parliament as reason to curtail the scope of fair dealing. Such arguments would have us believe that but for the collective licensing regimes imposed on captive Canadian taxpayers, students, and their families, CanLit would never have gained its prominence. Fortunately, logical argument and expansive data employed by a noted member of Canada’s writing scene tell a different story.

In Arrival: The Story of CanLit, Nick Mount’s painstaking exploration describes CanLit as an outcome of a confluence of many events: post-WWII affluence, the reaction thereto, the Centennial celebrations, some (perhaps unintentional) prodding by George Grant, and … . [You must read the book!] Not surprisingly though, the catalyst was money:

[Affluence] paid for new spaces in which its artists could perform and exhibit. It paid for new universities with departments devoted to studying and fostering music, drama, literature, and the visual arts; for new campuses with their own galleries, theatres, radio stations, magazines, publishers, and book-stores. It built new houses with new hi-fis that need playing and new bookshelves that needed filling, and it built new shopping malls in which to buy the new records and new books …. Affluence paid for the salaries that bought the homes that filled with the babies that filled the universities, both creating and conditioning the first generation for whom culture was a mass-market product (p.25).

But Mount is quick to point out that affluence did not extend to the writers and publishers themselves:

For all the new GNP, it was still tough to make a living from literature in Canada in the 1960s. The publisher of the most commercially successful writers of the period, McClelland & Stewart, flirted with bankruptcy throughout and after the CanLit boom. …. Most writers lived cheaply and at times precariously, surviving on small grants, the occasional teaching or writer-in-residence contract, sometimes even their writing (p.26-27).

To those who insist that fair dealing in educational institutions will bring about a decline in Canadian writing, Mount offers compelling evidence indicating that the problem is not unauthorized use of portions of novels but a lack of interest in entire novels to begin with:

Saskatchewan and British Columbia require students to read a novel or two, but Canadian literature is once again optional in Ontario high schools. At eleven of Canada’s largest twenty universities, English and French, you can complete a major in literature without any of it being Canadian. (At all twenty, you can complete a B.A. without ever reading a Canadian poem or novel (p.292)).

Mount’s data should invite sober reflection on the part of Canadian literary nationalists. Curtailing fair dealing seems unlikely to revive interest in adding Canadian content to Arts education in Canada; instead, curtailing fair dealing points to reducing circulation of Canadian content.

In academic degree specialties focused on Canadian literature, required reading material is likely already assigned as books. Thus, the impact of lessening fair dealing’s capacities will be on those programs that might only refer to Canadian content for supplemental purposes. In these cases, it is only too likely that a disinterested professor or teacher, coupled with risk-averse administrations, will choose to avoid using those supplemental pieces entirely.

If the damage could be confined to reducing the presence of Canadian literature in the academy; well, many of us could just sigh and say it was a self-inflicted wound. To lobby for copyright in the name of Canada without understanding Canada’s particular history in this area is simply a repetition of what has been done before. But, diminishing fair dealing entraps all disciplines, reducing that capacity to nurse creative thought essential to later creativity in all perspectives of arts and science. And what will be most painful to accept will be how unnecessary such action was. For, as Mount writes, “Canadian literature is more alive and more exciting than ever (p.292).”

Mount does not stint on detail: Canadian writers are increasing in number, their work is being published at home and internationally, new Canadian presses are blossoming, the quality of work is constantly ascending, and the depth and breadth of literature produced reflects both the diversity within the country and its coming-of-age on the world scene. Mount’s conclusion bodes well for Canadian literature now and Canadian creativity to come: “Quite simply, there has never been a better time to be a Canadian reader (p.293).”

Mount’s words complement those of Justice Barnes, who presided over Blacklocks v. Canada (A.G), 2016. That dispute revolved around limited sharing, for the purpose of research, of two proprietary articles legitimately obtained through a subscription; see here for my coverage.  The following lines seem particularly apropos at this time of year:

What occurred here was no more than the simple act of reading by persons with an immediate interest in the material. The act of reading, by itself, is an exercise that will almost always constitute fair dealing even when it is carried out solely for personal enlightenment or entertainment (para. 36).

Happy Fair Dealing Week.