Copyright for students

During your time at ACU, you will encounter a wide range of copyright material.

The Copyright Act 1968 will impact on students in a number of ways. It provides students with an ability to copy resources and also to own what they write. This page focuses on activities a student may undertake and how copyright law may impact on those activities.

If you are not sure what copyright law is, or what is protected by copyright please visit the Copyright basics page for that background information.

1. Accessing your learning resources

When you access your subjects in Canvas you will find an array of learning resources to assist you with your learning journey. These will include a mix of:

• ACU resources – material created by your teacher or ACU staff to support your learning.
• Licensed materials – material that ACU has purchased to support your learning.
• Scanned resources – material that ACU has paid a licence to copy to support your learning.
• Open resources – links to open resources available on the internet useful to support your learning.
• Creative Commons resources – links or copies of resources that are creative commons and useful to support your learning.

Under copyright law you can access these resources within Canvas. You can also download (when available) for personal use only and for use within class activities and assessments.

2. Finding your own learning resources

Your teacher may ask you, or you choose to research additional resources to use on the subject. The Library can assist with this. Under copyright law you have access to Fair dealing for research and study if you need to copy resources from anywhere.

You can use these copies for personal use, within class activities, and assessment tasks. Fair dealing copies cannot be placed on the public internet.

You are obligated to reference or cite the sources you copied for your learning. Your faculty will guide you on appropriate referencing methods or check the library referencing guide to start.

3. Class activities and assessment

Using Fair dealing for research and study, allows you can use any copyright material for class activities and assessments. This includes quoting the material. You are obligated to reference or cite the sources you copied.

If your teacher has allowed you to use an artificial intelligence (AI) to assist, these outputs are in the public domain, and you should reference the AI and date of output.

Note: Your class activities and assessments cannot be placed on the public internet if they contain any of the copied material. Your fair dealing rights for research and study do not extend to publishing the copied material on the internet.

4. Owning what you create

As a creator/writer you will own the copyright rights in what you create/write for class activities and assessment.

If you are working in a group, then copyright ownership will be split equally between the group. For example, 4 members own 25% each. To exercise any copyright rights will require all copyright owners to agree.

If a teacher wishes to use your work as an exemplar in future classes, they must obtain written permission from you to do that.

5. Getting permission

If you wish to publish (put on public internet) your material (that includes other people’s copyrighted material) you will need written permission from the copyright owners to do that.