In the age of easily downloadable culture, messages about copyright are ubiquitous. If you’re an artist, consumer, or teacher, copyright is likely a part of your everyday life. Yet no resource exists to explain Canadian copyright law to ordinary Canadians. In accessible language, using examples and case studies, this book parses the Copyright Act and explains issues pertinent to a range of particular groups of Canadians; it also makes a case for grassroots engagement in balanced legal reform.

Canadian Copyright: A Citizen’s Guide is not an alarmist call to stop the pirating of culture, but an articulate assertion that artists and consumers need not see each other as enemies. It should be essential reading for all Canadians concerned by how Canadian copyright law and policy affects them.

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Laura J Murray is Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. She is co-author with Samuel E Trosow of Canadian Copyright: A Citizen’s Guide (Between the Lines, 2007; second edition forthcoming 2013), and, with Tina S Piper and Kirsty M Robertson, of Putting Intellectual Property in its Place: Rights Discourses, Creative Labour, and the Everyday (forthcoming, Oxford, 2013). She has published in Indigenous studies and American literature; current research interests include history of reading, the nature of the newspaper, creative economies, and cultural policy.

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Samuel E. Trosow is an Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario in London; he is jointly appointed in the Faculty of Law and in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies and maintains a website at samtrosow.wordpress.com.

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This book carefully balances history and tradition with advocacy for reform…The audience for this book should include all Canadians, not just communications nerds, policy wonks, and working artists. Otherwise…we’ll get the culture that we deserve rather than the culture that we want.

Quill & Quire