Copyright registration

In Australia, there is no system of copyright registration. As a result, in Australia there is no legal requirement for a publication to be marked with the © symbol or any other form of copyright notice.

Here are the three basic requirements for copyright protection in Australia.

1. The material must be original.

Simply this means that the work is the product of the author’s own skill and labour and not copied from somewhere else.

2. The material must be fixed in material form.

This is defined in the Copyright Act to include “any form (whether visible or not) of storage from which the work or adaptation ... can be reproduced”. This encompasses works recorded in both visible form, for example written down on paper, or those recorded on magnetic tape, saved or recorded on computer disk or CDs are regarded as fixed in material form.

3. There must be a connecting factor to Australian law.

A sufficient connection exists if the material was created by a citizen, or resident of Australia, or of an overseas country, which is a signatory to one of the relevant international copyright conventions, or if the material was first published in one of those countries. All materials created at the direction or control of the Commonwealth or State Crown, or first published by the Crown, meet this criterion.