Copyright

Earlier in the semester we had a special guest lecture on Copyright given by Peter Hodges who worked in the BBC as a senior member of their legal team for a number of years.

The importance of copyright law is to allow people to protect their intellectual property, it protects the products of peoples skill, creativity, labour and time. This includes literary, dramatic, artistic or musical work, sound recordings, film, broadcast or typographical arrangements.

There is copyright in so many areas of life that some people may not realise when they are being breached, for example there are several copyrights in a single musical recording. As well as the recording itself there is also a copyright for the arrangement and the original song. So a song writer can write a popular song, they will own one copyright which is to the melody and words in the song, then several artists may record a version of the song, each of these different recordings would be covered under a new copyright, one for the performance and one for the arrangement.

One interesting example that Peter flagged was the Eiffel Tower, obviously it is one of the most recognisable landmarks in the world, but it is a danger for any tourist who wants a nice holiday snap. This is because the lighting design that illuminates the tower at night is copyrighted by the company that created it, this is mainly to restrict the way that the tower is shown and distributed in commercial media but it is something to be aware of.

To create a copyright of your work it is fairly simple, merely create a piece of work that shows some skill, creativity, labour or judgement, and then publish it. There is no need to seek for the copyright to be obtained by registration. Another thing to keep in mind is that even if you created the work, you may not hold the copyright. If you create the work while under employment then the employer will hold the copyright rather than the person who created the work.

There are several rights that are granted to the holder of the copyright with regards to the work that is copyrighted, there are:

• to produce copies or reproductions of the work and to sell those copies
• to import or export the work
• to create derivative works
• to perform or display the work publicly
• to sell or assign these rights to others
• to transmit or display by radio or video.

As you can see these are very restrictive, as you would expect, but there are ways of still using copyrighted material even if you did not create it yourself. Before I move onto that I will briefly talk about how long a copyright lasts, using material that is out of copyright is always easier when possible.

The standard length for a copyright is the life of the author plus 50-70 years dependant on the type of work. For literary, dramatic, musical works and films the copyrights lasts for 70 years after the authors death. For broadcast and sound recordings the copyright lasts for 50 years, from the end of the year it was recorded or released.

As I said the easiest way to deal with copyright is to avoid it by either creating your own work, e.g. taking your own photographs, or by using work which is in the public domain.

But there are several ways of using copyrighted material within the law, the first is to simply buy the martial. This then passes the copyright from the original author onto the person who bought it, this then gives them the right to distribute the work as they want.

The second and most commonly used way of using copyrighted material, this time without permission of the copyright holder and without paying for it, is fair dealing. You can only copyrighted material use fair dealing for 3 purposes, these are:

• research and private study
• criticism and review
• reporting current events

The first purpose is not really important for us because it is purely non-commercial. Criticism and review allows the use of quotes from books and plays and clips from films and broadcast when being used to write a criticism or review. On WINOL we have used fair dealing for this purpose a lot within Ewan's gaming review show.

The third purpose is reporting current events, this allows you to use copyright material to report a current event as long as sufficient acknowledgement is given to the author and it has been made available to the public. This defence does not cover photography. For a while there was a dispute over the football highlights and if they could be used under fair dealing of reporting current events, this is because of the amount broadcasters pay for the rights to broadcast sports.

I mentioned above that reporting current events doesn’t cover photography, but there is a way of using photographs within copyright law without paying the creator. Creative commons is a way of sharing copyrighted material, usually photographs, within certain guidelines set out by the author. These guidelines include crediting the author, whether the work can be modified in any way and if the work can be used for commercial means. Good sources of creative commons work are flickr and youtube, and on WINOL we try to use as much creative commons material as possible when we cannot get the images ourselves.

One point that Peter made that was important for me and my role within WINOL was about incidental inclusion and how it doesn't cover music. This means that if football fans are singing a song or tune at a match or if there is music being played over a PA then it is a breach of copyright. This is something I deal with on a weekly basis, especially with ice hockey and so have had to make reporters drop clips or cut shots shorter to avoid incidentally including music.

One of the biggest copyright battles in recent years involved Youtube and its parent company Google who were being accused pf massive intentional copyright infringement by Viacom, one of the largest media companies in the world. The lawsuit would have cost Google $1bn but they won and the lawsuit was thrown out. This is a landmark case between two global companies but it is good to note that copyright infringements incur much higher costs that libel cases.