Digital Pay-Per-Use Licences: Using Digital Content

To find out how to purchase a digital pay-per-use licence, please click here.

In an evolving digital environment, copyright is more important than ever before but also more complex.

Access Copyright is trying to make things easier by offering digital licences as a licence add-on for certain categories of users. We also issue digital licences on a pay-per-use (transactional) basis that cover many of the digital uses requested by users.

Digital uses may include scanning (taking a print work and digitizing it), importing a work from a digital form to a print form and taking a digital work and using it in a different digital format. To get permission for digital uses, go to our Rights Management System (RMS), where you may purchase a digital pay-per-use licence using our Licence Wizard.

You may also email us for more information. If you are from a post secondary school and would like to purchase a digital pay-per-use licence, you might find our RMS Users' Guide useful.

Below are some digital uses of works for which Access Copyright may grant digital pay-per-use licences.

Scanning

Scanning from a paper original into a computer is often referred to as digitization. If it is done without the consent of the copyright owner, it may be an infringement of copyright. Permission to scan extracts from an increasing range of published works is now obtainable through Access Copyright on a pay-per-use basis.

Intranets and the Internet

Copyright law applies on the Internet as it does to paper. It may be an infringement of copyright to post material on a website, for example, without the consent of the copyright owner. This applies whether the site is on an intranet, accessible only to members of an organization, or on the Internet.

For digitized extracts from books, journals or periodicals to be placed on an intranet, the copyright owner's consent may be obtained under an Access Copyright digital pay-per-use licence.

Using material from the Internet

Many websites contain a copyright notice detailing how the material they contain may be used. Often this is in the form of a hyperlink from a short copyright notice to a more detailed statement of what is permitted.

If no copyright notice is provided, or if the copyright notice does not allow the use you want to make, a good starting point for getting clarification or permission is to send an email to the site's webmaster.

If you have purchased an online subscription that allows you to print a paper copy of an article that appears online, this paper copy would be a legally obtained copy and could therefore be photocopied under the terms and conditions of your Access Copyright licence.

To determine whether the work you want to use is available for digital uses, visit our Rights Management System (RMS), where you can purchase a digital pay-per-use licence using our Licence Wizard.  You can also contact us for more information.  Please contact our Permissions department at permissions@accesscopyright.ca.