Fan Fiction and Canadian Copyright Law: Defending Fan Narratives in the Wake of Canada’s Copyright Reforms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Amateur, non-commercial writing based on contemporary copyrighted works — “fan fiction” — is a practice that is worth defending despite its unclear status vis a vis copyright law. In this article, I assess how Canadian fan authors may defend their works using Canadian copyright law. I argue that the recent copyright reforms are promising for fan and other second generation creators. The new fair dealing categories of parody and satire are positive steps, though the broad and technologically neutral non-commercial user-generated content provi-sion may be the most promising reform of all. I begin with an exploration of the benefits of fan fiction writing before going on to assess how fan fiction may have fared under the Copyright Act prior to the reforms. Subsequently, I argue that the new users’ rights embedded in the Copyright Act, including the new fair dealing exemption for parody and satire and, especially, the non-commercial user-gener-ated content (“UGC”) provision, may finally articulate a needed legal breathing space for fan fiction. While the UGC exemption appears tailored to YouTube and other audiovisual content, it may actually be the most important development yet for fan writers in Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".