The University of Toronto Press has published For the Encouragement of Learning: The Origins of Canadian Copyright Law (2023), by Myra Tawfik (University of Windsor). A description from the Press:
For the Encouragement of Learning addresses the contested history of copyright law in Canada, where the economic and reputational interests of authors and the commercial interests of publishers often conflict with the public interest in access to knowledge. It chronicles Canada’s earliest copyright law to explain how pre-Confederation policy-makers understood copyright’s normative purpose.
Using government and private archives and copyright registration records, Myra Tawfik demonstrates that the nineteenth-century originators of copyright law intended to promote the advancement of learning in schools by encouraging the mass production of educational material. The book reveals that copyright laws were integral features of British North American education policy and highlights the important roles played by teachers, education reformers, and politicians in the emergence and development of the laws. It also explains how policy-makers began to consider the relationship between copyright and cultural identity formation once British interference into domestic copyright affairs increased, and as Canadian Confederation neared. Using methodologies at the intersection of legal history and book history, For the Encouragement of Learning embeds the copyright legal framework within the history of Canada’s book and print culture.
From reviewers:
"For the Encouragement of Learning is an essential text for fully understanding the origins and development of copyright law in Canada. By grounding her insights in deeply researched historical contexts – colonial and Anglo-American copyright, educational and cultural trends, resistance to British copyright laws, the reading needs of French Canadians, to name but a few – Myra Tawfik has given us a landmark study for assessing Canadian copyright law’s past, present, and future." -- Robert Spoo
"Painstakingly researched and meticulously written, Myra Tawfik’s book provides a sweeping picture of early Canadian copyright history while dropping delicious anecdotes. Vast amounts of information are put together and transformed for the reader to experience an easy storytelling of Canadian copyright law within general Canadian history. It is the pre-Confederation copyright history book that was missing in Canada." -- Ysolde Gendreau
More information is available here. An interview with Professor Tawfik is available here, at New Books Network.
-- Karen Tani
