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 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.
Copyright protection for literary, dramatic musical or artistic work is provided:
For all practical purposes these provisions include the publications of most overseas countries.
For films, copyright expires seventy years after the death of:
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.