Students also benefit from user rights, including Fair Dealing and other Education exceptions! See relevant tabs for more information on exceptions, licencing, and using images, the internet, and more in your assignments. This page will include information relevant specifically to the student experience.
"Adventures in copyright" by opensourceway is licensed under CC BY SA
As a student, you also benefit from Fair Dealing exceptions, which allows them to make copies and scans of books for research, private study, and education. However, there are limits on the amount of a work that can be copied as fair dealing only allows for the reproduction of a short excerpt from any one given work. As such, photocopying is not an alternative to buying a textbook! Universities Canada (2012), in their copyright guidelines, suggests the following definition/allowances for a short excerpt:
"(a) up to 10% of a copyright-protected work (including a literary work, musical score, sound recording, and an audiovisual work),
(b) one chapter from a book,
(c) a single article from a periodical,
(d) an entire artistic work (including a painting, print, photograph, diagram, drawing, map, chart, and plan) from a copyright-protected work containing other artistic works,
(e) an entire newspaper article or page,
(f) an entire single poem or musical score from a copyright-protected work containing other poems or musical scores, [or]
(g) an entire entry from an encyclopedia, annotated bibliography, dictionary or similar reference work."
Even with Education and Fair Dealing exceptions that allow you to use other creators' content for assignments, the original creators still have the right to attribution. As such, you need to make sure that you are citing the original material. While failing to give attribution is not always an infringement of copyright (especially if it is an insignificant amount or if it would be covered by fair dealing), passing another individual's work off as your own without attribution can be considered both plagiarism and copyright infringement. See the "Plagiarism" tab in our Writing & Research resource guide.
Students own the copyright to any original work (i.e., essays/papers, portfolios, music) created during their time in school. Any reproduction of students' work (beyond copyright exceptions) needs to be done with the permission of the student (Murray & Trosow, 2013).