Insubstantial portion

Schools can make single or multiple reproductions of small portions of published literary or dramatic works (from either hardcopy or electronic form). Where the material is in electronic form, it may also be communicated. The “insubstantial portion” provisions of the Copyright Act do not require the institution to have in place a remuneration notice with CAL, but there are very specific restrictions that apply. In summary the insubstantial portion provisions allow for:

• educational institutions to make reproductions for the purposes of a course of education provided by them (rather than the wider for “educational purposes” definition which applies under the rest of the educational copying provisions of the Act);
• reproduction of no more than 2 pages or, if the work is more than 200 pages, 1% of the total number of pages in an edition of the literary or dramatic work in hardcopy format;
• reproduction and/or communication of no more than 1% of the number of words for published literary and dramatic works in electronic form;
• such reproductions to be only made on the premises of the institution providing the course,
• communication of any reproduced material only to occur on the institution’s premises.
• a 14-day embargo between first reproduction or communication of one insubstantial part of a work and another insubstantial part of the same work;
• restriction of online availability of material to a single insubstantial portion of a work at any one time.

The insubstantial portion provisions do not allow schools to reproduce all of a work, such as a poem or short story, even if the whole work is less than two pages or 1% of the total number of pages/words in the edition.

Further, these provisions only apply to published literary or dramatic works—they do not apply to music or artistic works, or to literary or dramatic works that have not been published.