Under the Copyright Act, (s40) it is not an infringement to make a fair dealing with a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work, or with an adaptation of a literary, dramatic or musical work, for the purpose of research or study.
For the purposes of this Act, the factors to be considered when in determining whether reproducing the whole or a part of a work or adaptation, constitutes a fair dealing for the purpose of research or study include:
(a) the purpose and character of the dealing;
(b) the nature of the work or adaptation;
(c) the possibility of obtaining the work or adaptation within a reasonable time at an ordinary commercial price;
(d) the effect of the dealing upon the potential market for, or value of, the work or adaptation; and
(e) in a case where part only of the work or adaptation is reproduced--the amount and substantiality of the part copied taken in relation to the whole work or adaptation.
Irrespective of the above fairness factors, the Act is more specific about some types of works. It specifies the following definition of reasonable portions, which applies in general to books and articles. With this in mind, copying a whole textbook would not be considered fair, even if you need it for your course but you think it is too expensive.
| Work or adaptation | Amount that is reasonable portion |
|---|---|
|
A literary work*, dramatic work or musical work |
all or part of an article, or more than one article in the same publication, (more than one article is not fair dealing if it is reproduced for the purpose of different research or a different course of study) |
|
A literary work*, dramatic work or musical work |
(a) 10% of the number of pages in the edition; or (b) if the work or adaptation is divided into chapters--a single chapter |
|
A published literary work* or dramatic or an adaptation of such a literary or dramatic work - published in electronic form |
(a) 10% of the number of words in the work or adaptation; or (b) if the work or adaptation is divided into chapters--a single chapter |
* literary work, excluding except a computer program or an electronic compilation, such as a database
In the case of electronic literary works, such as text on a website, if the website states that you may print or save the whole work, then the 10% limit does not apply. In this case, you are copying with permission of the copyright owner, and not relying on the fair dealing provisions of the Act. Some fair dealings are implied on the internet, for example, where a website provides a PDF document to download, there is an implied licence to download and save the whole document. It does not imply that you can share this document or distribute it further than for your own research or study. Check the terms and conditions of websites.
However, if you can only access copyright material by agreeing to accept certain terms and conditions which prevent certain types of uses, you should comply with those terms and conditions. For example, resources are often made available by publishers on textbook student companion sites. In general terms, your usage would be considered fair dealing if it is only for submission for assessment, but this could not be relied upon for public presentation or publication.
Unlike books and articles, the Act does not specify a reasonable portion of artistic works, sound recordings, films and videos, or broadcasts. Instead, you need to consider the Copyright Act's five fairness factors if you want to copy any portion of these.
As a basic step, you should ask yourself the following questions:
As you can see, the fair dealing provisions are quite complex, and should only be relied upon if you are confident that the copying you wish to do is allowable under the fair dealing provisions.
Note that some materials may consist of separate copyright items involving several layers of copyright. For example, a music CD may contain a number of separate musical compositions, each with three layers of copyright - in relation to the lyrics, the musical compositions and the sound recordings. This will affect how much of the CD you could copy in reliance on the fair dealing provisions.
There is no “reasonable amount” defined for fair dealing of computer programs or software, so even snippets of code may be deemed to be significant if they are pivotal to a program’s functionality. As with audio-visual items, you would be obliged to apply the fairness factors to determine if your dealing could be considered fair. If you rely on fair dealing to submit an assessment item that includes reused or copied code (with the correct attributions of course) that may be a fair dealing, but you could not rely on fair dealing to make it publicly available for sale or download.