Stop! You are breaking the law!

How to stay on the right side of copyright

by Laura Byrne Paquet

We've all done it. We've read something interesting in the newspaper, photocopied it, slapped a circulation list on it and passed it around. Technically, we were also breaking the law.

Copyright law is little understood, but is becoming increasingly contentious as new media make it easier than ever to steal an author's works. We're not lawyers (and this article is not legal advice), but here are some of the common misunderstandings. For more information, we'd suggest Lesley Ellen Harris's Canadian Copyright Law, which we used as the source for most of this information.

Here are some of the common misunderstandings.

But I bought it, why can't I copy it?

What you own is the physical object. You don't own the intellectual property it contains. There are certain allowances for "fair dealing," but that is defined as "private study, research, criticism, review or newspaper summary, if (i) the sources, and (ii) the author's name ... are mentioned."

To get permission, contact the source of the material and ask for written consent. Or wait for copyright to expire 50 years after the author dies.

I didn't see that ©, so it's not copyrighted.

On the contrary. Unless you are writing for your employer, or for the Canadian government, anything you write is copyrighted by you from the moment you write it.

To be eligible for copyright, a work must be original and fixed, meaning that your own work must go into it and that it must be in a permanent form. A speech given off the cuff is not copyrighted; the notes used to give a speech are, even if they are written on napkins, as is a videotape made of the speech.

Written recipes, term papers, song lyrics and letters to Aunt Joan are all copyrighted, as is just about everything you find on the Internet (including materials on this site).

But I'm not making any money!

Astonishingly, some people not only copy other people's work, but they insert the copies into their own publications! Cartoons are often stolen this way.

This is not only illegal, but it increases the odds of the owner of the work taking legal action, because you have stolen property that the owner would have preferred to sell.

And no, it does not matter whether your publication is "for information purposes" or "is a non-profit publication."

That's my idea, so I have the copyright!

You cannot copyright facts, ideas or actual events. You can only copyright the expression of an idea or an interpretation of facts.

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