In general, copyright is infringed if a person does any of the restricted acts listed in the Copyright Act 1994 in regard to someone else’s copyright, without the owner’s permission. If you think your copyright may have been infringed, first read this fact sheet and then the “What to do if your copyright is infringed” fact sheet. 

In New Zealand, the Copyright Act gives copyright owners the exclusive right to deal with their creations in certain ways, including the right to copy it, to communicate it to the public (for example, by making it available on a website or emailing it), to perform, play or show certain types of copyright material “in public” and to adapt certain types of material. 

Copyright is infringed when a person uses all, or a “substantial part”, of copyright material in one of the ways exclusively reserved to the copyright owner, without the permission of the copyright owner, where no defence or exception to infringement applies. 

A substantial part is any important or distinctive part of the original material. There are no guidelines about the quantity of material or percentage of a work which may be used without permission - it is a matter of fact and degree in each case. However, it is often said that it is the quality of what is taken, rather than the quantity that matters. It may be enough to infringe copyright by reproducing a very small part of another person’s work, for example by reproducing a few lines from a poem, an extract from a book or a paragraph from a journal article.

If someone creates a copyright work that is very similar to yours, but the similarity is coincidence and they have not copied your work, then there is no copyright infringement. For copyright infringement to occur, there must not only be a similarity between the two works but also some evidence that the similarity results from copying, either directly or indirectly.

A person who “authorises” someone else to infringe copyright will also infringe copyright. Courts have said that to authorise means to “sanction, approve or countenance” the infringing conduct. A person may authorise infringement by telling someone else to do something that amounts to infringement, or by permitting the use of equipment (such as a photocopier or CD burner) to infringe. 

In some situations, people can use copyrighted material without permission. The Copyright Act contains some exceptions to infringement which allow certain uses of copyright works, for example, fair dealing for the purpose of research or private study, criticism, review, or news reporting. There are also special provisions for libraries, educational institutions, public bodies and for other uses. For more information see the “Copyright Exceptions” and “Fair Dealing” fact sheets. 

It is also an infringement of copyright law to distribute or deal with infringing copies of works if a person knows (or reasonably should know) that the work infringes copyright. These types of infringements are known as “secondary infringements” and include selling, exhibiting in public and distributing infringing copies, as well as importing infringing copies into New Zealand. 

This means that if someone sells a copy of an artwork that they know has been made without the copyright holder’s consent, that seller would be infringing copyright, even though they didn’t make the infringing copy themselves. In this scenario, there would be both a primary infringer (the copier) and a secondary infringer (the seller).