For students
What can I copy?
The Copyright Act has a section called 'fair dealing'. One part of this section relates to 'fair dealing for research and study'. Under this section you may copy a 'reasonable portion' of a work for your own research and study.
The Act says that a reasonable portion is 10% or one chapter of a book, or one article from any one issue of a journal. Pictures, animations, graphics and diagrams may be copied also. If the material you want to copy is in digital format, then you can copy one chapter, if the work is in chapters, or 10% of the number of words if it is not divided into chapters. Pictures, animations, graphics and diagrams in digital form may be copied also.
Research and study includes assessment, so you may include portions of works in your assignments, projects and theses, provided that you attribute the sources properly.
Fair dealing also applies to audiovisual items, 'subject matter other than works'. It would be possible to make copies of reasonable portions of these things for research and study. What is a 'reasonable portion' is not defined, so you need to be careful.
If you have bought some computer software, or you are a licensed user, the Copyright Act says that you may make a copy of the program for the purposes of backup, research and study, error correction, interoperability (making your program interact with other software) and security testing.