Policy on inclusion of copyrighted material

The following is not legal advice. 

Breaching copyright is often confused with plagiarism. They’re not the same thing, though they both involve taking someone else’s ideas and passing them off as your own.

To avoid plagiarism, you must acknowledge your sources and provide proper credit. This includes words or depictions, even ones that you paraphrase. However, copyright is different. Simply acknowledging the source doesn’t prevent a copyright violation.

Copyright violation

Copyright is breached when anyone other than the copyright owner violates the owner’s rights over the copyrighted work.

Graduate students are usually most concerned with reproducing the whole work or a substantial part of a work for their thesis/dissertation. In this case, “substantial” is highly subjective, so we advise that you err on the side of caution.

Practical guidelines

As a practical guideline, the Faculty of Graduate Studies recommends that:

• you should try to seek permission to use a work if you intend to reproduce more than 10% of it in your thesis or dissertation, whether by quotation or otherwise. This usually means receiving a copyright permission or consent from the owner of the copyrighted work.
• you be aware that reproducing less than one full page or 10% doesn’t mean that you’ve avoided a copyright violation. As previously stated, the copyright process is highly subjective.

Items which may require consent/permission

You may have to obtain copyright permission or consent for the reproduction of the whole of any of the following in a thesis or dissertation:

• maps
• diagrams
• charts
• drawings
• surveys
• questionnaires
• computer code
• paintings
• photographs
• poems

Make sure you attribute the actual creator of the work.

Distortion & remixing

Don’t reproduce or remix any work for your thesis or dissertation without both:

• permission from the copyright owner
• a waiver of moral rights from the author/creator

Public domain

A work that’s been published for over 50 years from the death of the author is considered to be in the public domain. Works in the public domain are free from most copyright restrictions.

Be careful when dealing with reprinted works. Modern editions with additional editorial work or rearrangement of the original may have a new, independent copyright. For example, a public domain play with recently added modern stage directions or musical arrangements.

Whole or substantial inclusions

When you need to include "the whole" or "a substantial part" of a copyrighted item, you’re advised to apply to the owner of the copyright for permission. This can be time consuming and should be done well in advance of the submission of your thesis/dissertation.

Your letter of permission must recognize your right as the author of the thesis/dissertation to have it reproduced through the library and Archives Canada and its agents.

When you can't get permission or there’s a charge for getting it, you must either:

• Remove the copyright material and insert some text with the following information:
  1. a statement that the material has been removed because of copyright restrictions
  2. a description of the material and the information it contained. You should also supply a link to an online source, if available
  3. a full citation of the original source of the material
• Replace the material with a different work. This new material should either be:
  1. a work you can obtain permission to use
  2. a work where permission isn’t required. For example, a work in the public domain or covered by a Creative Commons license.