As Colleges and Universities across Canada are preparing for the start of a new academic year, it’s a good time to assess (or reassess) the state of copyright policies in our educational institutions.  It’s been over a year now since the Supreme Court’s pentalogy and the enactment of Bill C-11 adding “education” to the list of fair dealing categories. One would expect that by now our institutions of higher learning would have had time to digest these new developments, adjust their institutional policies accordingly, and offer useful guidance to students and academic staff in the form of published copyright guidelines.

And for the most part this has been done, at least as an initial matter.  While they are generally lacking in some important details which will have to be filled in, most Canadian colleges and universities have taken the prudent position of formulating and distributing some form of fair dealing…