Which copyright exceptions might apply to use of copyright material on the Internet?

There is no specific copyright exception applying to copyright material on the Internet but many of the general copyright exceptions might apply to material that has been published this way just as much as material published as hard copies. However, before you do anything, you should consider whether the material has been put on the Internet legally. There is much copyright material that has been put on the Internet without the permission of the copyright owner, i.e. illegally, and any further use of this, including downloading it, is likely to be illegal too.

Some of the more relevant exceptions that could apply to your use of material on the Internet might be the fair dealing exceptions and, if you are a teacher or pupil of an educational establishment and doing something for the purposes of education, the educational exceptions.

In particular, you might want to explore whether the exceptions permitting the following are relevant:

• "Fair dealing" for the purposes of non-commercial research or private study might apply to a student or another person who downloads and uses material in their own work, but it would be unlikely to cover giving the same material to a large number of people, such as all the students in a class, and putting the material on an Intranet. It does not apply at all to recordings of music or films.
• "Fair dealing" for the purposes of criticism, review or reporting current events might apply where short passages of, or extracts from, copyright material are put on an Intranet or even another Internet website for these purposes, but it does not allow a photograph to be copied for news reporting.
• The making of reprographic copies of published literary material by an educational establishment for the purposes of instruction might permit copies of material that can be legally downloaded to be made for the whole class. But it does not allow more than 1% of any copyright material to be copied and does not apply at all if the reprography is licensed. The Copyright Licensing Agency, the Newspaper Licensing Agency and Christian Copyright Licensing all offer licences, between them covering the copying of much published material.

Where copyright material has been put on the Internet legally, you may be able to argue that you have an implied licence to use the material in other ways. Also, a copyright notice on a website may set out what you can do so it would be worth looking to see if there is one.