What do you think?
Sam loves gardening and has been reading all about it. They recently scanned a chapter of a book on growing vegetables and saved it as a PDF.
Sam shared the PDF with friends in a Facebook gardening group. That’s OK isn’t it?
Exceptions in the Copyright Act for using material
Certain activities have additional copyright exemptions available to facilitate their publicly beneficial purposes. You will find additional copyright exemptions for:
- libraries and archives
- educational institutions
- legal advice and court cases
- healthcare
- broadcasting
- internet service providers
- software developers.
Fair dealing
You will recall that copyright aims to balance the needs of creators and users. One way that the act encourages this balance is by permitting some uses of copyright works without permission. These permitted uses are called fair dealings.
To rely on any fair dealing exception, you need to satisfy that your use:
- fits within the established fair dealing purposes, and
- is "fair"
What purposes get an exception?
These exceptions are available for specific purposes. Some specific purposes of fair dealing are for:
Research or study
Criticism or review
Parody or satire
Reporting the news
Access by persons with a disability
We’ll revisit fair dealing in Module 3: Copyright for your Studies when we delve into applying copyright exceptions in your assessments.
Tip
If you are re-using content protected by copyright as a fair dealing, make sure to attribute the author. This is required by moral rights and also makes your use more "fair".
Is it fair?
If your use is within the specific purposes of fair dealing, next make sure your use is “fair”. Ask yourself these questions:
- How am I using the work? Is this a commercial use?
- What kind of material am I copying? Is it valuable?
- How available is the material? Is it no longer available for sale?
- What harm will my copying do to the value of the copyright?
- How much of the work am I copying? Is it only a small part?
Example: copying 10% or 1 chapter of a physical book for private study is deemed to be a fair dealing for the purposes of research or study.
Myth
Fair dealing is the same as fair use.
Fair dealing vs fair use
Australia’s fair dealing exception is very different to copyright exceptions available in other countries and used frequently on internet services. Notably, the US relies on a broad “fair use” exception which has flexibility regarding the purposes of copying. Many acts which are claimed “fair use” would not be exempt in Australian law.
Other countries have “fair dealing” exceptions covering a wider range of purposes – some exceptions not currently legally available in Australia include fair dealings for purposes of education or fair dealings for purposes of quotation.
What do you think now?
Do you think Sam's use of the scanned book chapter on growing vegetables with their Facebook group is okay?
What is fair? Sometimes it’s not clear when this line has been crossed. Often a court may need to decide this.
Copying a single chapter for personal study is deemed fair, but it is not okay to then share or sell copies that were initially made for personal study purposes. This is because distributing the copy goes beyond the initial personal research usage.
Instead Sam should tell the group the reference details of the book so they can borrow, buy or copy the chapter themselves.