Copyright and Social Media

Official University social media channels are accounts in the University’s name and are managed by the University. Only authorised staff should be able to upload and edit posts on these channels – students or non-employees should not be able to access these accounts to post content.

• You cannot share anything that features commercial (ARIA) sound recordings on any official University social media platform.
• If you use music that is performed by a university student or staff member or university musical group (even if that music is a cover of a commercial song), then you can stream it on the official University social media platforms. However you must take care to ensure that the file is not downloadable, it needs to play within the platform with no download option.

• It is best to consult with Marketing about University-owned images for use in official social media channels. These images may be external images licensed to the University for this use or images created by CQUniversity to which the University owns the copyright.
• In your personal social media account please ensure you use images that are provided under a Creative Commons licence or are in the public domain. Make sure to acknowledge the creator of the image when you use it. This is a standard requirement of the Creative Commons license.
• You can source images that have a Creative Commons license in a range of different places including using the filters in a Google image search. 

• Copying and uploading scanned or downloaded copies of books or journal articles is against copyright unless you have permission from the Copyright owner (which may not always  be the author), or the material is available under a Creative Commons licence.
• You are able to quote a few lines of text from a book or journal article. If you want to use more you will need to seek permission from the copyright owner.
• Best practice is to provide a link (usually via a doi) to the original work. 

• Link to or share someone else’s post, rather than reposting it. Reposting consists of downloading content, or cutting and pasting, and reposting it so that it appears to come from your account in the first instance. Reposting is quite common for social media users, particularly if they are wanting to move content between different social media platforms, but unless you have permission from the original copyright owner to use the image, video or text, then this would be infringing copyright. Just because it’s on social media doesn’t mean the original copyright owner has provided permission. If you want your friends to see it, link to or share the original post.
• Don’t include copyrighted content in your own posts unless you are the creator, or you have purchased a licence for the content which specifically includes social media use. Photos you have taken are fine, but not someone else’s unless they have provided you with permission. 

Australian copyright law only applies to human creations and has not yet been updated to consider the implications of content created by generative artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT or Adobe Firefly. Currently in Australia, copyright is not applied to works generated by non-humans. 

As there is currently no copyright protection for content generated from AI tools, there are no limits (under copyright law) on the portion of these works that you can use, but it still best practice to disclose all use of AI generated materials. You should also be aware that some AI tools may generate outputs that accidentally infringe another person's copyright because of the material it was trained on.

Further information on this topic is available from the Australian Copyright Council Factsheet: Artificial Intelligence & Copyright.