Somewhere in your drive is a worksheet nobody remembers the origin of. It's been taught from for years, it's good, and the day someone asks where it came from you'd like the answer to be written down already. That's the whole case for a rights register, and it takes an afternoon.
Four categories, one per document
Every worksheet, note, passage and paper you teach from falls into one of four honest categories.
| Category | What it means | What you can do with it |
|---|---|---|
| Wrote it | You or your staff authored it, as centre work | Anything. No licence needed. |
| Licensed it | You bought or were granted a licence from the publisher | Whatever the licence says, and no more |
| Copied it under a licence | Photocopied from a published work under a statutory or collective licence | Within the licence limits, for the licensed purpose |
| Not sure | Nobody remembers, or it arrived with a tutor | Find out before it's used again |
The fourth category is the one that matters. Most centres have some of it, and it's rarely a problem until the day it is. A register turns "not sure" into a list of things to check rather than a surprise.
Why a register, and why now
Three people will ask where your material came from, and none of them will give notice.
A publisher, if a passage from their book turns up somewhere it shouldn't. A buyer or a partner, if you sell the centre, open a second campus with someone, or license your program. And any platform that takes your material seriously, because it should ask at upload.
A register is a grid: document, origin, rights category, and where it applies the licence and its number. The material rights register is a printable version with a spreadsheet layout, the four categories in plain language, and a takedown note for the day a publisher writes to you. Fill it in during your material audit. Update it every time a folder is added.
It's not a legal document. It's the document a professional centre keeps.
What the Statutory Education Licence covers
In Australia, the Copyright Act 1968 includes a statutory licence, administered by the Copyright Agency, that allows educational institutions to copy limited portions of published works for educational purposes in return for a fee. It explicitly covers tutoring organisations, not just schools. The usual limit is up to 10% or one chapter of a published work.
For a centre that photocopies from textbooks, this is what makes the photocopying legitimate. If you copy from published texts, you should hold one regardless of any software you use.
What the licence does not clearly settle is whether copying under it extends to uploading that material to a third-party platform for conversion. That is a question for the Copyright Agency or a lawyer, not for a software company, and the guide to the Statutory Education Licence for tutoring centres sets out what exists and who to ask. Material you wrote yourself needs no licence at all, which is why "wrote it" is the safest folder to convert first.
New Zealand is different
Under the Copyright Act 1994 an educational establishment must be not conducted for profit. A commercial tutoring centre in New Zealand therefore can't rely on the educational copying exceptions and generally needs a CLNZ business licence to copy published material. Self-authored material is, again, the safer base, and most good New Zealand centres wrote most of theirs.
Same register, same four categories. The "copied it under a licence" row just names a different licence.
None of this is legal advice. It's a description of what exists. Confirm your position with the Copyright Agency, CLNZ, or your own adviser.
What a platform should require at upload
If you're handing years of material to any software company, the upload step tells you a lot about how seriously they take rights.
A serious platform asks, per document, which of the four categories it's in, and records the answer. It asks whether you hold a Statutory Education Licence if you've marked anything as copied under one. In New Zealand it asks one more question: how much of this did you write yourself? And it treats the answers as part of the record, so that when a question comes later the basis for each document is already there.
That's what we do at upload, and it's why the security and ownership page spends as much time on your rights as on ours. The other half of the same page: you keep every right to your material and everything derived from it, we claim none, we never reuse or redistribute it, and we never train on it. A register on your side and a clear position on the vendor's side is the whole arrangement.
The rule that makes this simple
Convert what you wrote first. It's the folder with no licence question, it's usually your best material anyway, and it's the one a parent is paying for when they choose you over the centre down the road. The licensed and copied folders can follow once the register is filled in and your adviser has said what they say.
What to do this week
Open the drive. Pick one year level. Beside each document write one of four words: ours, licensed, copied, unsure. Count the unsures. That's your list for next week, and the first rows of your register.