Today the Canadian Coalition for Electronic Rights joins a growing list of organizations representing creators, innovators, educators, students and consumers to form the Fair’s Fair Coalition. In a public letter to Industry Minister Tony Clement and Heritage Minister James Moore the Fair’s Fair Coalition asked that the first priority of any legislation to amend the Copyright Act should be to transform fair dealing from an artificially narrow defence into a flexible tool to better accommodate Canadians’ expressive and innovative values in a digital age.

We call on the Canadian government to amend the Copyright Act to clarify that:

1. any dealing that may qualify for the defence so long as it is fair, and
2. the enumerated categories of dealings are illustrative of potentially fair dealings, rather than exclusive categories of qualifying dealings.

Tree truths counsel the wisdom of this amendment:

1. Flexible fair dealing advances copyright law’s policy objectives in a digital age.
2. Flexible fair dealing advances Canadian values.
3. Flexible fair dealing is consistent with Canada’s international obligations and the policies of Canada’s major trading partners.

Flexible fair dealing represents the simplest and most comprehensive means of addressing many of the long-recognized short-comings of Canadian copyright law in a technologically neutral way. Flexible fair dealing will fix Canada’s parody problem, at long last legalize fair consumer practices such as time-shifting and consumer backups, and offer greater security to innovators and creators, such as documentary film-makers, who build on the works of others. “The change we ask for is simple and equitable: what’s fair is fair, and should also be legal“.