LibGuides: Copyright: About Copyright

What is copyright?

Copyright provides protection for any intellectual property by ensuring that it cannot be copied or altered without the permission of the copyright holder. Copyright does not need to be officially registered; the act of creating a work is enough for it to be protected. Nor does it need to display the © symbol. It is important for the work to exist in some tangible form as you can't copyright an idea.

The basis for most current copyright legislation is the Copyright and Patents Act 1988.

The copyright legislation refers to copyright subsisting in four broad areas:

 literary, dramatic, musical works or artistic works (this includes books and periodicals etc);

 films;

 sound recordings, broadcasts, cable programmes and computer generated works;

 publishers’ copyright of typographical arrangements.

There is also a specific copyright in databases, and the legislation has been interpreted to include most other material including electronic resources such as the Internet.

In practice, this is likely to include most material that you want to copy. It also means that in any one work for example there may be several claims on copyright, by the author, publisher, illustrator, etc.

Copyright Ownership

The owner of copyright in any work is the creator of that work, unless it is created in the course of our employment, when it is owned by your employer, in our case the University.

How long does copyright last for?

to the author of the work, person who created it during their lifetime;
to their executors for seventy years after the author’s death;
for the typographical arrangement of a published edition for twenty-five years from the date of publication.

For all practical purposes these provisions include the publications of most overseas countries.

For films, copyright expires seventy years after the death of:

the principal director;
the author of the screenplay;
the author of the dialogue;
the composer of the music created for and used in the film.

For sound recording, broadcasts, cable programmes and computer generated works, copyright lasts until the fifty years after the end of the year in which they were first made, released or first broadcast or included in a cable programme service.