Subject to a few exceptions within the Copyright Act, you may not use copyright protected work in your writing, even if with attribution, unless you have been granted permission from the copyright owner. Here are a few exceptions: Work that is out of copyright. Copyright in a work subsists for the life of the author plus 50 years (soon to be 70 years once the new law is proclaimed in force). Assuming the author of a work is alive or has not been deceased for 50 (or 70) years, then the author’s or other owner’s permission to use that work must be sought and obtained. Fair dealing exceptions. Consider whether any of the time-honoured exceptions of research, private study, criticism and review, and news reporting, applies to your work. Further, if your work is satire or parody, then you likely fall under a fair dealing exception. Another recently added exception, educational purposes, is more controversial and should not be relied upon. The breadth of this exception has not been determined. You should seek a lawyer’s opinion before assuming fair dealing applies. Even if fair dealing applies, “giving credit,” or attribution rules, may well apply. Non-commercial user-generated content. This is sometimes called the “mash-up” exception, so-called to protect “mash-ups” of video and audio clips from many sources. However, it’s conceivable that a literary work could also be a “mash-up.” Many conditions are attached to this exception—the first one being that no income can be earned from the copyright-protected work. Again, seek a lawyer’s opinion before assuming this exception applies.