Copyright

I had a look at "The Copyright Act 1994 and Amendments: Guidelines for Librarians", posted on the LIANZ website, to see the new sections that have been added. I was a little alarmed by section 21 which seems to say that printing or downloading anything off the Internet could be a breach of copyright and that librarians need to police this. I certainly haven't noticed many sites specifically saying the copying is permitted. However surely the ordinary rules of copyright apply to items on the net i.e. fair dealing for research or private study? This isn't made clear in the body of the document but the summary tables in Appendix 5 list 'electronic works in any format' which would seem to include material on web sites. I think it would be useful to have a copy of this summary table at the reference desk. If we use the new "Notice regarding copying and downloading from the Internet" in Appendix 2, I think we will have a lot more copyright queries from people. The news coverage of the copyright issue already seems to have increased people's awareness. In the last month I have had 2 patrons ask about copyright compared to none in the previous 12 months.