If you are presenting at a conference that is:

• not for profit;
• for educational purposes; and
• held on University of Saskatchewan (USask) premises for an audience primarily of students;

then you can display or distribute materials without permission if your use falls under the USask Fair Dealing Guidelines or another educational exception in the Canadian Copyright Act.

If the criteria above are not met, then using copyright-protected materials in a conference presentation is not generally covered by educational exceptions in the Copyright Act. However, some library licence agreements that USask is party to may allow for small portions (for example, one image) from electronic library resources to be included in your conference materials. Please contact resource.acquisition@usask.ca for licence details regarding conference use of electronic library resources.

The Copyright Office can also assist with a fair dealing analysis to assess whether use of the material at a conference could constitute fair dealing. If your intended use of the materials does not fall under an exception or an existing licence, you can seek permission from the copyright holder.

If you are organizing a conference, you may be planning to record or stream the conference presentations and/or make conference materials available online. Please note that the presenters hold the copyright for conference materials they have created. If you would like to copy and share the presenters’ materials (for example, their presentation slides, posters, etc.), please acquire permission from the presenters before doing so. This can be done by distributing a form to presenters requesting their permission to distribute their work. Please be as detailed as possible when describing how the materials would be distributed (that is, limited only to conference attendees or posted openly on the internet).

Also, please note that presenters may have included materials for which they do not hold the copyright in their conference posters or presentations. For example, a presenter may have acquired permission from a publisher to include an image from an article or book in their conference presentation or handout. Additional permission from that publisher would be required if you or the presenter would like to distribute the work beyond the allowances of the original permission or licence.