Year in ReviewUnderstanding Our Market
Understanding Our Market
“It's the right thing to do. You have to put a face to the work, these are actual creators making all this and it's their job.”
In 2025, Access Copyright undertook a comprehensive market-research project to gain a deeper understanding of Canada’s corporate sector.
We wanted to learn several things. How are knowledge workers accessing and using copyright-protected content to get their jobs done? What do workers know and understand about copyright, compliance, and licensing obligations? What motivates Canadian businesses to reuse published content responsibly, including with an Access Copyright licence?
For this work, we partnered with an independent market-research agency with significant experience doing similar work with copyright management organizations like us.
After two sets of in-depth interviews with licensing decision-makers and a quantitative survey of 1,100 Canadian white-collar workers, we better understand the corporate sector’s problems and how collective licensing can help solve them.
This work represents an important milestone as we look to expand the adoption of licences among Canadian organizations. We are excited to put this research to work in 2026 through a new business-to-business sales and marketing strategy.What we learned
There is widespread internal and external use of copyright-protected works in Canadian workplaces. Ninety-one percent of Canadian workers regularly use published content in their day-to-day work.
Low awareness of licensing’s role in ensuring copyright compliance. Almost half of private-sector workers surveyed believe that most internal uses of content can be done without a licence.
Misconceptions around obligations under copyright law are rife. There is little awareness that content found online is protected by copyright and that citing a source does not automatically ensure compliance. Further, there is deep uncertainty about organizations’ licensing agreements and whether they allow content re-use.
Use of website content is widespread and use of published content to prompt generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools is accelerating. Three out of five private-sector workers who regularly use GenAI for their jobs include published content to prompt AI tools at least once a month.
We wanted to learn several things. How are knowledge workers accessing and using copyright-protected content to get their jobs done? What do workers know and understand about copyright, compliance, and licensing obligations? What motivates Canadian businesses to reuse published content responsibly, including with an Access Copyright licence?
For this work, we partnered with an independent market-research agency with significant experience doing similar work with copyright management organizations like us.
After two sets of in-depth interviews with licensing decision-makers and a quantitative survey of 1,100 Canadian white-collar workers, we better understand the corporate sector’s problems and how collective licensing can help solve them.
This work represents an important milestone as we look to expand the adoption of licences among Canadian organizations. We are excited to put this research to work in 2026 through a new business-to-business sales and marketing strategy.What we learned
There is widespread internal and external use of copyright-protected works in Canadian workplaces. Ninety-one percent of Canadian workers regularly use published content in their day-to-day work.
Low awareness of licensing’s role in ensuring copyright compliance. Almost half of private-sector workers surveyed believe that most internal uses of content can be done without a licence.
Misconceptions around obligations under copyright law are rife. There is little awareness that content found online is protected by copyright and that citing a source does not automatically ensure compliance. Further, there is deep uncertainty about organizations’ licensing agreements and whether they allow content re-use.
Use of website content is widespread and use of published content to prompt generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools is accelerating. Three out of five private-sector workers who regularly use GenAI for their jobs include published content to prompt AI tools at least once a month.