As the author, you are responsible for ensuring that you have the right to publish all the material that you plan to include in your book without violating copyright. This entails determining the copyright status of all material not of your own creation and assessing whether its inclusion in your work is lawful. Broadly speaking, material that is not your own may be reproduced lawfully in one of the following scenarios:
- It is in the public domain and not protected by copyright;
- It is protected by copyright but its republication is defensible as fair dealing;
- It is protected by copyright but you have obtained permission to republish the material from its creator or copyright holder; or
- It is protected by copyright but you have met conditions for its republication, which may include a specific credit, citation, or payment of permission fees.
Determining Copyright Status
Copyright protects creators’ rights to their original literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works for the duration of their lives and for a certain number of years after their death. As of 31 December 2022, the term of copyright protection in Canada is the life of the author plus seventy years. This replaces the previous copyright term of life of the author plus fifty years, but this amendment does not affect works that entered the public domain before 31 December 2022. Some works (such as those anonymously published, co-written, unpublished, posthumously published, and photographs) may have different copyright terms.
Useful resources on Canadian copyright questions, including copyright term and fair dealing, include the website of the Canadian Intellectual Property Office’s Guide to Copyright. Many universities include guides to copyright and to fair dealing in teaching, research, and publication, such as Queen’s University’s Overview of Copyright; or the University of Alberta’s detailed Introduction to Copyright Law and helpful copyright duration flowcharts.
If you have questions about determining copyright status or whether permission is required that would affect material reproduced in your book, you should consult your acquisitions editor. It is important to think about the logistics of including material that is not your intellectual property early in the process.
Fair Dealing
In certain circumstances you may be able to reproduce the copyrighted work of another author or creator without seeking permission and without violating copyright law. In scholarly publishing this involves the principle of fair dealing. The Canadian Copyright Act specifies that “fair dealing for the purpose of research, private study, education, parody, satire, criticism, review, or news reporting” does not infringe copyright if the author and source are identified; similar provisions exist in other countries (with different criteria for assessing fairness) and are known as “fair use.”
The use of brief textual excerpts from published and unpublished sources for the purposes of analysis or discussion or as evidence, as is frequently done in scholarship, is generally recognized as fair dealing, as long as the original source is fully acknowledged and the use is “fair.” This may also be the case for visual sources that are central to a book’s ideas and analysis and are discussed explicitly. An assessment of fair dealing must be made on a case-by-case basis for works included in your book, by determining whether use is more or less fair using each of six criteria. The following list includes questions that would be germane to a decision regarding work reproduced in scholarly books; it is not intended to be complete or exhaustive but to give you a sense of the meaning of each of the criteria involved in fair-dealing assessments.
- The purpose of the dealing
- What is the intent of the reproduction within the context of your book? Scholarly publication is often a combination of research and criticism, and the reproduction of others’ works in your book should further those ends, broadly conceived. This criterion also encompasses the evaluation of whether the purpose includes a commercial element. Scholarly publication is not the same as private research and often results in a commercial good (a book that is sold), but MQUP is a not-for-profit scholarly publisher and scholarly books are not published for direct financial gain to the author.
- The character of the dealing
- Is the reproduction wide-reaching, long-lasting, or is it temporary and private? How may copies are made?
- The amount of the dealing
- How much of the original work is reproduced? Evaluate this in terms of overall amount and proportion to the whole. Is all material reproduced absolutely necessary, or can the amount be reduced?
- Alternatives to the dealing
- Is it possible to make your argument without reproducing or showing readers the original work or part of it? Can it be paraphrased or cited without being reproduced without detrimental effect to the expression or clarity of your ideas? Can another work not protected by copyright be used with the same effect?
- The nature of the work
- Is the original material published or unpublished? Was it originally intended as a private document or one on the public record? For example, a print advertisement is intended explicitly as a public document that is seen as widely as possible; on the other end of the spectrum, a private journal may not ever have been intended to be read by anyone other than its author.
- The effect of the dealing on the work
- Does your book compete with the market for the original work? In other words, is it conceivable that someone would purchase your book to have access to the work reproduced instead of purchasing a publication or other commercial reproduction by the copyright holder?
While the staff of McGill-Queen’s University Press do not offer legal advice, you should consult your acquisitions editor if you are considering including material for which you have not requested permission based on principles of fair dealing.
Types of Material Reproduced in Scholarly Books
Authors’ Previous Publications
Your book may include some of your own previously published texts, such as a journal articles or book chapters in an edited collection. You may have transferred publication rights or copyright to the original publisher and now wish to reproduce some of the work in your own book. Because this is a common occurrence, many publishers will allow you to reproduce your own writing without an explicit permission request as long as its previous publication is acknowledged, but you should determine that this is in fact the case. Consult the contract you signed or the journal’s general author guidelines, which may include a policy on republishing work as part of your own book.
Text
Textual material may include song lyrics, poetry and prose excerpts, dramatic dialogue, texts with cultural or commercial value, and unpublished work (such as letters, diaries, archival material, etc.). Citation of these sources, in part, and only when required for the purpose of your analysis, argument, or discussion, as is common in scholarly prose, is generally considered fair dealing. You should nonetheless make a careful assessment of fair dealing criteria. Pay particular attention to sources from which you quote the largest proportion of the whole work or substantial and repeated excerpts. Is all of the material cited explicitly discussed or required to understand your ideas?
Textual material quoted in epigraphs is much less clearly fair dealing, and permission is likely to be required.
Permission is usually suggested for quoting substantial portions of song lyrics that are not in the public domain.
Visual Material
Visual material includes illustrations, photographs, drawings, or other artworks that are not your own creative work. It can also include maps, graphs, or figures from other publications.
To reproduce visual material in your book, a digital file meeting MQUP’s minimum resolution requirements is always required. The acquisition of such a reproduction may be independent of securing permission from the creator (for instance, in a case where you already possess a digital reproduction of the work, or when you are seeking the digital reproduction from a source – like a museum or archive – that does not represent the creator). Or it may be closely linked (in a case where only the creator has access to the reproduction required). Acquisition of the digital file for the publication may at times be the only request you need to make (in cases where an archive owns the work but it is in the public domain). In some cases, a fee may be levied to provide a reproduction of an image even if it is in the public domain or if permission to reproduce that image is not included in the agreement. For illustrative material, in particular artwork, it is especially important to be cognizant of the difference between obtaining a digital reproduction and obtaining permission to reproduce someone else’s intellectual property.
In the case of an artwork, the artist may retain intellectual property rights even if another party owns the work itself. In such cases, permission to reproduce the work may be required from the artist, their estate, or artists’ collectives such as CARFAC or SODRAC, while a fee may be levied by a museum or private collector providing the photograph or digital file being reproduced in the book.
The reproduction of some visual material may be defended as fair dealing. A common example is the use of select frames or screenshots from a film in a book of film criticism, in which those illustrations are necessary to articulate the author’s ideas about the film in question. This may also extend to scholarship taking other forms of visual culture as its subject. Please note that even when reproduction may be defended as fair dealing, there may be other considerations that lead an author to seek permission and offer remuneration for visual art reproduced in their book, such as your relationship with the rights holder, a desire to compensate artists for their work, or ethical or professional guidelines separate from Canadian copyright law.
In all cases, a high-quality, high-resolution file is required in order to reproduce visual material in your book.
Interviews
If your manuscript includes content from interviews you conducted during your research, you must obtain written consent from any interviewee who is identified in your book or whom readers could possibly identify. A copy of the consent forms should be filed with MQUP. (If this is impossible for reasons of confidentiality, we request a letter from you attesting that the consent forms are in your possession.) Interviewees who remain anonymous should have been made aware at the time of the interview that you may quote from their statements in a publication.
Whom to Ask for Permission
If permission is required to reproduce material from a published work, you should begin by contacting the original publisher. If the publisher does not hold the rights to the material in question, they may be able to direct you to the rights holder.
Permission to reproduce a published illustration, map, figure, or table must usually be obtained from either the author of the book in which the work appears or the rights holder. Use the credit line or acknowledgments of the original publication to identify the source – a credit should include details on who created the work, provided the material necessary to print it in the book, and/or licensed its use.
For permission to reproduce material from an unpublished work, you should contact the creator of the work. If the creator is deceased, you should contact their estate. In some cases, reproduction rights to a work may rest not with the creator but with the person or organization who owns the physical work, and permission must be obtained accordingly.
What to Request
Please consult your acquisitions editor to obtain complete and accurate wording for a reproduction request that includes publication format (cloth or paper and ebook), territory (we request world rights to be able to sell your book internationally), and information about pricing, print run, and projected publication date. In making any request to reproduce material in a book published by MQUP, it is important to note that we are a not-for-profit scholarly publisher.
As the author, you must make every effort to contact rights holders, and you should keep a record of all your correspondence related to rights and permissions queries. When you have received all of your statements of permission, please send electronic copies to your acquisitions editor.
Since it can take some time to receive a response to permissions requests, we advise that you begin making your queries at an early stage. In most cases, permissions requests can be made and granted via email.