Copyrights in Canada

Canadian Copyright Registration: $350

Includes our fees and all government fees.

Protect your copyrights in Canada: register them.

We can assist you protect your copyrights in Canada by registration under the Copyright Act, RSC 1985 c C-42.

In order to register the copyright in your work in Canada, we require:

• the name(s) of the author(s) of the work
• the date and location of authorship
• the name of the owner of the work
• the address of the owner of the work

Registering your copyright is an important step towards protecting your rights in your creation.  It forms an important component of proving what you created and when, so that if necessary you can enforce your rights, and defend yourself.

Canada is a member of the Berne Convention.  In rough terms, this means that copyrights arise automatically upon authorship for any work authored in any convention state in all convention states.  This answers a common question: how to get a copyright in Canada?  It is not necessary for an author to file or do anything to acquire copyrights: copyrights in Canada arise automatically upon creation of the work.

However, registration of a copyright in a work can be a very helpful for proving your rights and increasing the damages that you are entitled to recover for infringement.  Two key questions that commonly arise in copyright disputes are: i) who created what? and ii) when did they do it?  A copyright registration is a means to address these questions: it provides prima facie evidence of who created what, when.  In Canada, damages in copyright matters are not as dependent on registration as they are in the United States, but nevertheless a Canadian copyright registration can be quite helpful in proving the value that you attribute to your work, and thus can support your claim to damages.