It is for this reason that the education and training community does not oppose passage of the Bill, subject to a number of relatively minor amendments. However, the sector's strong view is that the Bill can only be seen as a first step in updating copyright legislation to take into account the online environment and that formal processes will need to be set in place, involving the education and training community, to develop legislation which will give Australia a digital copyright regime which is capable of properly balancing the interests of users and creators and investors into the future. The following paragraphs set out the specific difficulties which the education and training sector has with the Bill as currently drafted. Comments on fair dealing provisions The education and training community welcomes the extension of the current fair dealing provisions to the online environment. This is a clear example of the way in which the Bill will impede the effective use of online technology for teaching and learning.
Instruction currently occurs both in classrooms and on line.
In the future it will increasingly occur on line. In an online situation, students may be required to produce the equivalent of assignments in a purely electronic format. The Bill would prevent a student including a copy of a reasonable portion of a work in an electronic project unless he or she were unable to obtain a hard copy. This would have the absurd result that a student who happened to have a hard copy of a particular work would be unable to rely on the fair dealing for private study provisions to submit an electronic assignment while a student who did not have such a copy would be able to do so. The problem is that in many circumstances, electronic and hard copy versions of a work are not interchangeable.