CanadaCopyright Act, fair dealing
In force since .
A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.
- Audit expectation
- none
What it requires
- A use of a copyrighted work must fall within an enumerated fair-dealing purpose (research, private study, education, parody or satire, or another statutory dealing elsewhere in the Act) to avoid infringement; collecting or reproducing text to train a generative model is not itself an enumerated purpose.
These lines are LexLint's reading of the law's text. Also read by: CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada, 2004 SCC 13, [2004] 1 S.C.R. 339 (recorded ).
Who enforces it
Settledness
- As of
- Case link
- https://decisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/2125/index.do?iframe=true
- Case citation
- CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada, 2004 SCC 13, [2004] 1 S.C.R. 339
- Open questions
- Is copying works from web pages to train a commercial model 'research' within 'research, private study, education, parody or satire' in section 29 of the Copyright Act, or does it fall outside every listed purpose?
What it makes you log
Logging duty
Section 29 states that fair dealing for research, private study, education, parody or satire does not infringe copyright. It sets no condition that the dealer record or retain anything, and the Act has no text-and-data-mining exception, so there is no miner's record to keep.
- Kind
- None
- As of
What this law does
Fair dealing for the purpose of research, private study, education, parody or satire does not infringe copyright; further statutory dealings are enumerated elsewhere in the Act (including, at s. 29.2, news reporting).
The list is closed rather than illustrative, unlike US fair use, and Canada has enacted no text-and-data-mining exception of the kind the EU's Digital Single Market Directive or Japan's Copyright Act provide, so training an AI model on copyrighted text collected by crawling falls outside the enumerated fair-dealing categories and outside any text and data mining (TDM)-specific carve-out; a 2023-2024 government consultation on copyright and generative AI had not produced legislation as of mid-2026.
The current text, adding education, parody or satire to the enumerated purposes, was substituted for the whole section by the Copyright Modernization Act, S.C. 2012, c. 20, s. 21, in force since .
How courts have read itPremium data
Our analysis of this law draws on 1 court ruling.
What each ruling held, what it means for an app, and whether it still stands are premium data, in the Plus, Pro and Enterprise plans.
When LexLint raises it
When your app profile says your app crawls the web, trains models, generates content with AI or reuses other publishers' content.
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