Copyright Act, fair dealing
A citation is an address, not a summary. The first part names the law; what follows narrows it to the exact section, article or paragraph.
In force since 7 November 2012.
A copyright and text and data mining (TDM) rule binding public and private bodies.
As of 2 September 2026.
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.
What this law does
Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.
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.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_webtrains_modelsgenerates_contentaggregates_content
Read the law
official consolidated statute text, Department of Justice Canada Justice Laws Website