FAIR DEALING
DEFINITION
Fair dealing is the closed-category copyright exception used in the UK and other Commonwealth jurisdictions, permitting unlicensed use of a work only for specific statutory purposes such as research, criticism, review, quotation, or news reporting. Unlike US fair use, it does not extend to purposes outside the enumerated list, however reasonable the use might seem.
WHAT IT MEANS IN PRACTICE
Because fair dealing works from a defined list, a use either fits a recognised category or it does not; there is no open weighing of general fairness for a use that falls outside those categories, the way there is under US fair use.
The specific categories and their conditions vary by country. UK fair dealing includes purposes like criticism, review, quotation, caricature, parody, and pastiche, while Canadian fair dealing includes education as its own standalone category, which the UK does not recognise in the same broad way.
This makes fair dealing more predictable than US fair use in one sense, since you can check a use against a defined list, but less forgiving in another, since a genuinely reasonable use with no bad intent still fails if it does not fit a listed purpose.
Confusing fair dealing with fair use is a common transatlantic mistake, since American commentary about fair use gets applied by UK creators to a legal system that does not actually work the same way.
AN EXAMPLE
A UK academic quotes several paragraphs from a novel in a published critical essay analysing its themes. This fits the UK's fair dealing category for criticism and review, whereas using the same paragraphs purely to pad out an unrelated commercial product would not fit any recognised category, regardless of how small the excerpt is.
WATCH OUT
UK creators sometimes lean on American fair use arguments they have seen online, not realising UK law only recognises a fixed, narrower list of purposes.
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