Flexible Dealing

Note: some types of copyright material will almost always be protected by an access control TPM (such as commercially produced entertainment DVDs like 'The Castle'). You are never allowed to remove or disable an access control TPM for the purposes of section 200AB. For more information on what is an 'access control TPM' see information sheet “Technological Protection Measures and the Copyright Amendment Act 2006”.

How do I know if my use is for the purposes of giving educational instruction?

Your use will be for the purposes of giving educational instruction if you need to use the material for teaching (including remote teaching), preparation for teaching, preparing materials for students to use for homework or research tasks or other uses that are for the purposes of teaching.

Note: "just in case " copying will not generally be for the purposes of giving educational copying (eg, "I'll copy that in case I need it sometime in the future "). You should have a particular instructional purpose in mind.

Back to top

Your use will be non-commercial as long as you, your class or your school do not make a profit or obtain some other commercial advantage from your use of the copyright material. This does not stop you from charging a cost recovery charge in relation to the use (for example if you copy material onto discs and you want to charge students the cost of their disc).

This is a requirement that your use of the work be narrow in both size and scope. The more narrow your use of copyright material, the more likely that your use will be a "special case ". In other words, using a small amount of something for a classroom activity is almost always going to be a special case. Copying more than what you need, or copying material "just in case I need it ", where you don't know exactly how you are going to use it, might not be a special case.

How do I know if my use conflicts with the normal exploitation of the copyright material I want to use?

Your use will conflict with the normal exploitation of the copyright work if you copy or use copyright material in circumstances where it is possible to buy the material from the copyright owner (including in a shop or online), or if you could obtain a licence for your use (eg, if you have ordinarily obtained a licence from the same publisher to use the same or a similar type of work).

See the flow chart for more information about how to decide whether your use conflicts with normal exploitation.

Your use will unreasonably prejudice the copyright owner if it hurts the copyright owner's interests in either an economic or non-economic sense in an unreasonable way.

For example, if you expose the copyright owner's work to a high risk of piracy (eg, uploading a music file to the internet) you are likely to be prejudicing the copyright owner. This might also be the case if you take more of the copyright material than you need (eg, you copy a whole music CD when you only need to copy 1 song).

See the flow chart for more information about how to decide whether your use will unreasonably prejudice the copyright owner.

For further information, contact your local copyright manager.

Back to top

Smartcopying