Copyright Issues Regarding State (Past) Exam Papers

IrishAcademic

I found a thread in the Leaving Cert board that discussed this topic (titled "Leaving Cert Copyright Issues").

My question is: may one use state (past) exam papers (e.g. Junior & Leaving Cert) for the use of educational material on-line (e.g. a website with notes that goes though the solutions of Junior/Leaving Cert exam questions, or the same for YouTube videos)?

At the end of the mentioned thread, a user posts the terms and conditions that one must agree to when searching for past exam papers using the Exam Material Archive of the State Examinations Commission's website. These terms and conditions read:

2.2 Users may retrieve examination material solely for their own personal, non-commercial use, as specified at 2.2 above, and may download the material to their own hard disc or send it to a printer solely for that purpose. They may not otherwise copy, modify, or distribute the examination material, or publish, broadcast, transmit, or otherwise distribute any portion of this material without the express written authorisation of the State Examinations Commission. Any unauthorised use is strictly prohibited. The State Examinations Commission permits no unauthorised modifications, adaptations or translations of the examination material.

However, another (a more general) part of the website states:

Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2005 (SI 279 of 2005)

The State Exams Commission complies with the Regulations on the Re-use of Public Sector Information and we encourage the re-use of the information we produce.

All of the information featured on our website is the copyright of the State Examinations Commissions unless otherwise indicated. You may re-use the information on this website free of charge in any format.

Re-use includes copying, issuing copies to the public, publishing, broadcasting and translating into other languages. It also covers non-commercial research and study. Information and documents from this website may be re-used subject to the latest terms of the latest PSI licence available at _

Re-use is subject to the following conditions. You must:

Acknowledge the source of our copyright in cases where you supply the information to others;
Reproduce the information accurately;
Not use the information in a misleading way;
Not use the information for the principal purpose of advertising or promoting a particular product or service;
Not use the information for or in support of illegal, immoral, fraudulent, or dishonest purposes.

The State Examinations Commission is not liable for any loss or liability associated with the re-use of information. While every effort is made to ensure that the information on its website is accurate, the State Examinations Commission does not certify that the information is up-to-date or error free. The State Examinations Commission does not authorise any user to have exclusive rights to the re-use of its information.

The State Examinations Commission maintains the following information on its website:

(And it goes on to lists things, including the Exam Material Archive, including past papers.)

I'm also curious how educational publishing companies acquire the rights to use exam papers where the main purpose is to sell their product itself, e.g. those past papers booklets that just contain the past papers or past paper solution books. (Unless the main purpose for those is considered education or information distribution?)

gaiscioch

This is a live issue with the SEC. I rang up last year asking why they changed the url for the papers on Examinations.ie. (you used to be able to move seamlessly between each year by changing the year at the end of the url; now you must start from scratch each time, which is very time consuming).

The SEC man told me that the LC websites were breaching copyright and while the SEC/DoES is not too fussed about said websites they are worried that they could be sued for breach of copyright. This is because some writer(s)/poet(s) etc did complain to them about the online websites freely using their personal work and accordingly the SEC had to be seen to initiate some form of action against online sites (making it more difficult to get the above url was a small part of that, he said). They had not received similar complaints for the published hardcopy Edco exam papers. It seems to be a covering exercise on the part of the DoES/SEC, establishing and giving notice of their rights but in practice letting the websites in question continue on for the moment.

spurious

There is also a difficulty with the Ordnance Survey extracts and photos.