Australian Copyright Council

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FAQ

Can we apply the “anthology rule” to material available on a website?
2.11.2009

The “anthology rule” (which allows you to copy all of a literary or dramatic work in an anthology if it’s no more than 15 pages long) does apply to material on the internet, but you need to take care how you apply it.

 

You still need to be able to identify an “anthology” before you can apply the rule, and in our view it’s unlikely you could apply the rule to a website generally or to a collection of different pages on a website. In practical terms, the rule is likely to be available where you have, for example, speeches or essays or poems or short stories and so on all contained in the one file, such as a pdf or Word file.