Content area
Full Text
Twenty-first-century Canada has shifted its definition of copyright to give more weight to fair dealing and to users' rights. Copying original, recently published works without the permission of the copyright owner is more explicitly legal than ever before. The purpose of this essay is to discuss the significance of this historic shift for the unique case of poetry. What effect will the redefinition of fair dealing have on Canadian poetry? Should teachers provide free copies of poems to their students? How important are royalties to poetic creativity? How do contemporary poets make a living, and how does copyright contribute to it? From 2014 to 2015, I directed a survey of approximately fifty active Canadian poets to gather evidence on their sources of revenue and the utility of copyright as they see it.1 The results indicate that, while the poets unanimously cherish moral rights in their work, the direct commercial benefits of ownership, as measured by the sales of authorized copies, are so low as to be almost negligible. Nevertheless, ownership retains indirect value, in that it provides a framework for the subsidization of poetry. In light of these findings, it is reasonable to advance a complex model for the production of Canadian poetry, one that prizes the established system of government grants for creative writing and authorized book publishing, but that also recognizes the good that comes of unauthorized copying. State sponsorship and fair dealing are compatible tiers in the economics of poetry.
The Legal Context
Jurisprudence and legislation have combined to reform the law of copyright in Canada. In 2004, the Supreme Court delivered a landmark ruling in CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada, stating that fair dealing is a user's right that should not be interpreted restrictively. The judgment was remarkable but not radical: fair dealing had been an integral component of copyright law since the eighteenth century (Katz 97-104). In 2012, the Supreme Court confirmed the 2004 ruling in a suite of five further decisions that have been dubbed the "Copyright Pentalogy" Meanwhile, Parliament passed the Copyright Modernization Act, S.C. 2012, c. 20, which explicitly expanded the definition of fair dealing to include not only research, private study, criticism, review, and news reporting, but also parody, satire, and, most...