Copyright in Canadian Journalism: What Organizations Need to Know

Foundations of Canadian Copyright Law

Copyright in Canada is governed by the Copyright Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-42, as amended. The Act is federal legislation that applies uniformly across all provinces and territories. Canada is a signatory to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, which means that Canadian copyright law meets international minimums and Canadian works are protected in most other countries without registration.

Several foundational principles are especially relevant for organizations that commission or publish journalistic content:

• Copyright arises automatically. In Canada, copyright is created at the moment an original work is expressed in a fixed form. There is no registration requirement. A journalist's article is protected by copyright from the moment it is written — no copyright notice, no registration, no formal claim is needed.
• The term of protection is life plus 70 years. As of the 2022 amendments to the Copyright Act, the standard term of protection for works created by an individual is the life of the author plus 70 years (extended from the previous life-plus-50 standard). Works created after this amendment are protected for 70 years after the author's death.
• Copyright is a property right that can be assigned or licensed. The owner of copyright in a journalistic work can transfer (assign) all rights to another party, or grant a licence allowing specific uses while retaining ownership. These are fundamentally different legal instruments with different consequences.
• Ideas are not protected; expression is. The facts reported in a news article are not protected by copyright. The specific expression — the sentences, the structure, the selection and arrangement of material — is protected. You can report the same facts; you cannot copy the article.

Who Owns Commissioned Journalism?

This is the single most consequential copyright question for organizations that work with freelance journalists, and the answer surprises many clients: under Canadian law, copyright in a commissioned work generally vests in the author, not the commissioning party.

Section 13(3) of the Copyright Act provides that where a work is made by an author in the course of employment (as a permanent employee), copyright belongs to the employer. But this provision does not apply to independent contractors — freelance journalists, contract writers, and incorporated communications professionals. A freelance journalist who writes an article for your organization, even if you paid for it, retains copyright in that article unless the agreement explicitly transfers or assigns copyright to you.

This has immediate practical consequences:

• If your commissioning agreement is silent on copyright, the journalist owns the article and you have, at most, an implied licence to publish it in the specific context for which it was commissioned.
• You cannot republish the article in a different publication, translate it, include it in a book or annual report, post it on your website, or license it to a third party without the journalist's explicit permission.
• Even if you obtained a formal copyright assignment, the journalist retains moral rights (see below), which cannot be contractually waived without explicit agreement.

The standard practice in professional journalism commissioning is to negotiate an explicit licence — not a blanket copyright assignment — that specifies exactly which uses the commissioning organization is permitted. This is the approach reflected in Flatoutserver's Terms of Service.

Types of Licences

Not all publishing agreements are the same. The type of licence you hold over commissioned journalism determines what you can and cannot do with it. The following table summarizes the main licence types relevant to journalism commissioning.

Moral Rights: What They Are and Why They Cannot Be Assigned Away

Moral rights are distinct from economic copyright. They exist in Canadian law under section 14.1 of the Copyright Act and protect an author's personal connection to their work. They cannot be assigned to another party — only waived, and only by explicit agreement. Even if you hold a full copyright assignment over an article, you do not hold the author's moral rights unless they were expressly waived.

Moral rights in Canadian law include:

• Right of integrity: The author's right not to have their work modified, mutilated, or used in association with a product, service, cause, or institution in a way that is prejudicial to their honour or reputation. Substantially editing a journalist's article, adding content they did not write, or associating their byline with a product they would find objectionable can violate the right of integrity.
• Right of attribution: The author's right to be identified as the author of the work, or, conversely, to remain anonymous or use a pseudonym. You cannot remove an author's name from their article and claim it as your organization's work without their consent — even if you hold the full copyright.

In practice, many professional commissioning agreements include a moral rights waiver for the specific uses covered by the contract. This is a negotiated element. At Flatoutserver, our standard terms include a limited moral rights accommodation: we do not waive attribution rights (our team's professional reputation is tied to our work), but we waive the right of integrity for standard editorial modifications within the revision rounds included in the contract.

What Flatoutserver's Terms Provide

Our Terms of Service provide clients with a clearly defined, perpetual, non-exclusive licence to publish commissioned work on their owned digital platforms, include it in their archives, and make it available to readers. The licence scope is:

• Perpetual (no expiry date) for publication on client-owned platforms
• Non-exclusive (Flatoutserver may republish or reference the work in portfolio contexts, with prior notice)
• Restricted to named uses (digital publication, archiving, internal distribution) — not a blanket transfer of all rights
• Not sublicensable (the client cannot license the work to third-party publications, aggregators, or translation services without a separate agreement)

Extended rights — broadcast rights, translation rights, rights to publish in a print anthology or annual report, rights to sub-license to partner publications — are available under a supplementary rights addendum negotiated at commissioning. Contact us to discuss your specific needs before the engagement begins; retrofitting rights after delivery is possible but more complex.

Digital and Social Media Use

Digital publishing has multiplied the number of ways an organization can use or misuse a commissioned article without intending to infringe copyright. Common situations that require explicit licence coverage include:

• Posting on your website: Covered by the standard Flatoutserver licence for clients who commissioned the work. Not covered for organizations that purchase a reprint or link permission from a third-party publication that owns first-publication rights.
• Sharing on social media: Sharing a hyperlink is not a copyright issue. Reproducing the full text of an article in a social post — whether on LinkedIn, in a Substack, or in a Facebook page update — is a reproduction that requires a licence. The "it's just a quote" defence is not unlimited; reproducing 200+ words of a 1,000-word article in a social post is likely to exceed fair dealing thresholds.
• Email distribution: Forwarding or distributing a commissioned article to your members, subscribers, or stakeholders via email is a reproduction. If it is a Flatoutserver-commissioned piece and you are the client, your standard licence covers internal and subscriber distribution. If it is a third-party article, you need that outlet's reprint permission.
• AI training and ingestion: The status of using journalistic content to train large language models is unsettled in Canadian courts as of 2026. The safest position is that ingesting copyrighted articles into an AI training dataset without a licence is a reproduction that requires rights clearance. Several Canadian media organizations are litigating or negotiating this question actively.
• Translation: Translation is a derivative work under the Copyright Act and requires explicit licence coverage. A licence to publish an article in English does not grant the right to translate and publish it in French.

Common Organizational Mistakes

• "We paid for it, so we own it." Payment does not transfer copyright. Only an explicit assignment or a licence agreement transfers rights. If your commissioning agreement does not address copyright, you likely have fewer rights than you assume.
• Using "fair dealing" without understanding its limits. Canada's fair dealing provisions (sections 29-29.2 of the Copyright Act) permit the use of copyrighted material for the purposes of research, private study, education, parody, satire, criticism, review, or news reporting — but only to the extent reasonable and with attribution. Organizations that reproduce substantial portions of news articles for internal briefing documents under a claim of "research fair dealing" are often outside the provision's scope.
• Not securing rights before repurposing content. If a journalist wrote an article for your website and you want to include it in your annual report, pitch it to a national magazine, or translate it for a francophone stakeholder newsletter, each of these is a new use that requires either an existing licence covering that use or a new agreement. Do not assume that the original commissioning fee bought you all future uses.
• Screenshot sharing. Capturing a screenshot of a published article and posting it to social media is a reproduction of both the text and any photographs or graphics. It requires rights clearance. A hyperlink to the original article is the copyright-compliant alternative.
• Aggregating third-party articles on an internal intranet. Building an internal news clipping service that reproduces articles from national outlets on your intranet without a copyright licence is a common and commonly misunderstood infringement. Licensing options exist (the Copyright Licensing Agency of Canada and similar collectives manage these licences); explore them before building the service.

Copyright Compliance Checklist

• All commissioning agreements explicitly state the scope of the licence granted to your organization
• Agreements with freelance journalists address moral rights (attribution and integrity) with a clear waiver or retention clause
• Your organization's social media policy distinguishes between sharing hyperlinks (permitted) and reproducing article text (requires licence)
• Internal distribution of third-party articles is covered by a blanket licence from a rights management collective, or individual reprint permissions have been obtained
• Translation of commissioned articles is explicitly covered in the commissioning agreement before translation work begins
• Extended or additional rights (broadcast, print anthology, sub-licensing) are negotiated before delivery, not after
• Your legal counsel has reviewed the copyright provisions in your standard commissioning template within the past two years