Q. Education statutory licence for copyright for teaching

The education statutory licence is a copyright licence* that covers educational institutions such as schools, TAFEs and universities.

It allows a university to copy and communicate, for educational purposes,

• text and images,
• sheet music, and
• broadcast content (i.e. audio-visual material)

Educational Purposes

The material can only be used in connection with a course of instruction and must only be available to students undertaking instruction.

It can be made physically available to students through photocopies or coursepacks, or uploaded into a content management system (CMS) or learning management system (LMS) that is only accessible to students enrolled in a course. The material should be accompanied by a copyright notice that notes the material has been copied in accordance with the licence. Using the Readings platform at JCU helps to ensure compliance.

Content can be emailed to students from staff members, but must be done so in a way that is minimises misuse. Use JCU email addresses for both staff and students, and include a copyright warning so that the students know it is not to be shared with others.

What can be copied?

The licence allows the copying of any format from any source, as long as it does not exceed a "reasonable amount".

If the item is available for purchase

You may copy and make available to students:

• A chapter or up to 10% of a book
• One article from an issue of a journal or magazine (or more than one article on the same subject, e.g., two articles on the same diabetes intervention in an issue of a journal)
• The whole of an image that accompanies text (e.g., an image on a page of a book or journal article), or the whole of an electronic image (e.g., an image on Flickr or Wikimedia Commons).
• Up to 15 pages of a published anthology
• 10% of a music score

This is per student per course. For example, you cannot make two chapters of the same book available to the same student during the same course. Making too much content available to the same student is known as a copyright clash. The Readings platform is designed to ensure copyright clashes do not occur.

If the work is not commercially available:

If the work is out of print and cannot be purchased in a "reasonable" timeframe for an "ordinary commercial cost", it is possible to copy more than 10% or one chapter and may copy as much as you need. However, you must undertake "reasonable investigation" to attempt to find a commercially available copy, and you must be able to show that you have only copied what you need for a specific, present, actual use (i.e., you cannot supply copies of things that "might be useful" in the future).

As with material that is available commercially, you must use JCU systems like Readings to ensure this material is only supplied to students undertaking a course of study.

*Permission to use copyrighted material