Commonwealth, State and Territory governments can rely on a very broad exception in the Copyright Act – section 183 - to use copyright material without permission, providing they are doing so for “the services of” the relevant government. (This provision is also available to many government agencies, but not to local councils.)

Section 183 also allows a government to request other people and organisations – including libraries – to copy on their behalf. So if you receive a request to supply a copy of something to a government, you may generally do so without infringing copyright.

However, in this situation, the terms and conditions of the subscription agreement may prevent you supplying to people outside your organisation. So, before copying articles you access via a subscription, check the subscription terms and conditions.

It is, however, more than likely that you would be entitled to copy the articles from the open access site. From a resources point of view, however, you might consider whether you will copy the materials or send the client a link to the articles so they can copy them themselves.

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Anything that has been digitised under the “administrative purposes” provision should only be made available to library staff and volunteers; it should not be made available to clients.

If you want to digitise newspaper clippings so they are accessible to clients, investigate the various licences available to organisations from Copyright Agency Limited (CAL). www.copyright.com.au

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A government library can probably do this under the government use provisions in the Copyright Act (section 183).

A library in an educational institution may also be able to do this under Part VB of the Copyright Act.

For other libraries, such as a public and corporate libraries, options include:

• circulating a list of contents with your own abstracts (rather than copies of the documents),

• getting a licence from CAL – this allows some digitisation of published materials for internal purposes. http://www.copyright.com.au/Licensing_schemes.aspx

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It is unlikely that you can do this without copyright clearance from the record companies that produced the CDs, and from AMCOS for any songs still protected by copyright.

There is a special exception in the Copyright Act that allows "space-shifting" of music (e.g. from a CD to an iPod or to another CD), but it is limited to private use.

In some cases, a library may be entitled to "space-shift" under section 200AB, but it is unlikely to apply in this situation.

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In our view, the requirement for a “signature” in the electronic environment can be met by ways such as the following:

• having space in the form for the person requesting a copy to type in their name; or

• setting up a password system, where each client has a unique number or password.

In each case, make sure that the “signature” is used not merely as a log-in or when filling in name or address details, but is clearly used to signify both that they are the person making the request and that they are making the relevant declaration.

(The declaration they make is that: they want the material “ for the purpose of research or study”; that they “will not use it for any other purpose”; and that the library hasn’t previously supplied them with a copy of the same material.)

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In our view, declarations may be made electronically (for example, via a website) and they may be kept electronically.This means you don’t need to keep paper copies of such declarations.

The records do need to be kept “in the order reflecting the dates on which the declarations were made”, so make sure the electronic declarations are filed chronologically within relevant folders on your computer system or on back-up disks.

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