Permissions & exclusions
Licences & permissions
Copyright applies to published material – books, journals, newspapers, magazines, art and music – whether or not the © symbol is displayed.
If your copying falls outside what the Copyright Act allows, you need permission from the Rightsholder before copying or sharing their material.
General public
You can make one copy from an original if:
- it is for your own personal research or private study
- you have written permission from the rightsholder
Educators
For lesson planning, teachers and educators may:
- make one full copy of an original
- make multiple copies of up to 3% or three pages of an original (whichever is greater). The section copied must not give away significant information, such as chapter summaries.
If you need to copy more than the Act allows, you can seek permission directly from the rightsholder – which can be time-consuming and costly – or get a copyright licence from Tāwhia Copyright Aotearoa.
What our licences don’t cover
A Tāwhia Copyright Aoteroa licence lets you copy and share far more than the Copyright Act alone allows. But some material is excluded.
Always check before copying:
- Material downloaded from the internet
- Printed music, including lyrics and sheet music
- Loose maps and charts
- Unpublished religious orders of service
- House journals and other free publications for employees of commercial, industrial or public service organisations
- Illustrations and photographs outside the provisions of the licence
- Privately owned documents issued for tuition to fee-paying clients
- Theses, dissertations and student papers
- Workbooks designed to guide student work, support classroom learning, internal assessment or end-of-year revision
- Entire plays – education institutions wanting to copy complete New Zealand plays must licence through Playmarket
Specific excluded works
Some copyright owners ask that their works be excluded from our licensing schemes. If you want to copy or share any listed material beyond what the Copyright Act permits, you need to contact the Rightsholder directly for permission.
View the current list of excluded works (PDF, updated 31 August 2023).
A Guide to Rocks, Sacha Cotter, Josh Morgan © Huia Publishing 2023