Copyright
A client of mine was asking me only last week to advise him on how copyright law affects his new website. I pointed him to IP Australia’s web page on copyright as a starting point.
Copyright is free. It protects the original expression of ideas: it does not protect the ideas themselves. Copyright operates automatically from the time it is created and protects works from unauthorised reproduction, publication and communication.
The Copyright Council of Australia (CCA) has published a handy information sheet on creating and publishing on the Internet. The key point is that websites in their entirety are not covered by copyright, but constituent works - graphics, text, and so on - may be. Interestingly, the copyright in these component parts may be owned by different people, and not necessarily by the website owner.
Both the CCA and IP Australia recommend using a copyright notice to indicate the owner of copyrights within Web content. Within my own websites, I use public domain or attribution (such as GPL or Creative Commons Attribution) licenced images and content.
Using a logo from the Curtin website would constitute a breach of copyright unless permission was expressly granted and attribution was made. Some question surrounds the following statement in Curtin’s Copyright Statement:
Under the “fair dealing” provisions of the Commonwealth of Australia Copyright Act 1968 an individual may make a single copy of a “reasonable portion” of the material on this site without prior permission or payment, provided it is for the purposes of research or study, criticism or review.
The question is whether or not using a logo on an assignment webpage constitutes use for the purpose of research or study, criticism or review. For this assignment, it is unlikely, so using the logo would be ill-advised.