I can simply copy 10% or one chapter of a book and hand it out to my class, can't I?
Answer
This is not recommended. The problem here is that we are all assessed as NMTAFE and not individual teachers and lecturers, so a single lecturer may copy 10% but you may be one of 10 other lecturers using the same resource. This means that, as a college we may in fact be copying an entire book or report and therefore using more than the 10% or one chapter only rule. This would be a breach of copyright and bring significant costs to NMTAFE.
For example, say there is an eBook titled ‘The Computer Matrix’, and a lecturer named Trinity downloads and prints chapter 3 from that book and distributes it to her class. A week later Trinity’s colleague Neo does the same for chapter 6.
Next semester, NMTAFE gets audited by the National Copyright Unit and they find the two chapters. Since both lecturers work for NMTAFE, it counts as 2 chapters as being copied by NMTAFE. Consequently, NMTAFE must pay significant costs as the book was copied with no permission being sought.
This could have been avoided by
- Getting permission from the publisher; or
- Getting a link to the eBook and sharing the link with students.
NMTAFE currently has no way to monitor what percentage or what chapters of a textbook have been copied by lecturers.