What would happen if everytime you wanted to use an image in an school assignment, instead of just crediting it – you had to write to the photographer for permission to use it? Or your instructor wanted to use that same image in a preszentation but they needed to wait to hear back from a publisher for permission before they could post it to D2L – and your test is Friday? What would happen if you wanted to photocopy a single chapter of a Library Reserve book to read at home – but first you needed the formal ok of the author? What about if you were working on a research assignment with a classmate and wanted to send a single article you scanned from a journal to them so they could read it too – but couldn’t because it would be considered copyright infringement. What if your professor could never upload anything ever for you to read to your class no matter if it is a just a few pages and important for your educational studies without it being against the law?
Luckily in Canada we have something called fair dealing, a copyright exception that gives you a user’s right to make and use short excepts of copyrighted materials for certain purposes such as education, private study, research and criticism and review – activities you do everyday as a student. If that copyright exception – fair dealing – was not in Canadian laws and in the Copyright Act – that material would be unavailable for you to copy without a licence – which could limit your access to material that contain knowledge you need to learn. Much of what students and educators do on a daily basis would be really really hard without fair dealing.
Fair dealing is really important because it allows a freer flow of information to happen in an educational setting – it promotes learning and scholarship. Creator’s rights (an authors or publishers right to be compensated for the use of a work) is in balance with your right to use a short excerpt of a work without having to get the permission every time you use copyrighted material in your school work. So celebrate Fair Dealing – it is a user’s right that Canadians should use, not lose.
Sixty new Dell Latitude 3340 laptops have been added to the Library’s mobile learning programme. They are now available for borrowing from the Circulation Desk. All the new laptops are equipped with Windows 7 and include the Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office. Check our website for a 
Dr Gucciardi is an Associate Professor in the School of Nutrition and an Affiliate Scientist with the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute. She has written over a dozen publicly-accessible manuscripts on diabetes research. On the subject of open access, she writes:
June is National Aboriginal History Month!