Sections 40- 43 and Section 103 of the Copyright Act allow some free use of copyright material. This is called fair dealing. In the USA, it is called fair use.
Fair dealing in Australia applies only to the following activities.
The fair dealing right most relevant to students and staff is fair dealing for research or study. It only applies to your own individual research or study. Staff cannot rely on this provision to make copies for students. If you want to do that, consult Chapter 9 of this guide Copying Print Material
Under the fair dealing provisions you may copy a reasonable portion of literary, dramatic and printed musical works for the purpose of study or research. If you copy a portion of a work under the research or study provisions, you cannot reproduce it for another purpose, such as publication, at a later date. If you wish to include copyright material in a work which you plan to publish, permission must be obtained from the copyright owner. See Writing for publication for further information.
A reasonable portion includes up to 10% of the total number of pages in a book containing 10 or more pages, or one chapter of a book - whichever is greater. In the case of electronic publications, websites for example, the 10% limit applies to the total number of words in the work. For periodical publications, the limit is one article from any one issue, or more if the articles are on the same specific subject. Periodical publications can be in hard copy or electronic form, and may include journals, newspapers, and magazines.
There are very limited circumstances under which you may be able to copy more than 10% or one chapter of a literary, dramatic or musical work. For such a dealing to be fair, it must satisfy the requirements of the five fairness factors listed in the Copyright Act.
The reasonable portion rule does not apply to artistic works, sound recordings, films and videos, or broadcasts. Instead, you need to consider the five fairness factors if you want to copy any portion of these:
All five of the above fairness factors need to be considered. 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. For example, copying a whole textbook would not be considered fair, even if you need it for your course but you think it is too expensive.
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.
In certain circumstances, you might include a substantial portion of someone else's work in a publication of your own, for the purpose of criticism or review of that work or of another work. In such a case you must be careful that such an inclusion is genuine, and could not be interpreted as "padding" or free riding. You must subject the reproduced work to direct critical analysis.
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