Copyright for Teaching

What is copyright?

Copyright exists to encourage creativity; to protect the rights of the creators and to enable them to profit from their efforts. There are 5 types of intellectual property (IP) categories: patents, trademarks, design, trade secrets and copyright.

Copyright protection gives the creator the exclusive right to: copy, issue copies, rent or lend, perform, show, play, communicate the work to the public or adapt the work, and the right to stop others from doing any of these things without their consent.  Unpublished works are also protected by copyright.

The author also has moral rights:

• the right to attribution - to be recognised as the author of the work
• the right to object to derogatory treatement of the work
• the right to object to false attribution
• the right to privacy of certain photographs and films

What qualifies for protection?

• To qualify for copyright protection the work has to be 'original' and must be the author's own intellectual creation. The creator must have used skill, labour and judgement in the creation of the work.
• The content must have been made by a qualifying person, natural or legal. The first copyright holder of a work is usually its creator.
• You cannot copyright an idea, only its expression in a fixed format such as text, sound recording, film, music score etc.
• In the UK Copyright comes into existence automatically as soon as a work is created without any need for registration. The work does not need to display a © symbol.
• If the work was made in the course of employment, copyright is owned by the employer unless a contract specifies otherwise.
• As copyright is a type of property right it can be sold (‘assigned’) or leased (‘licensed’). The copyright holder may be someone other than the original author of the work. Additionally a work may have different copyright holders - for example for the text and the illustrations.
• When works are published the copyright is usually transfered to the publisher but there are different kinds of licence and it is important to understand your contract with the publisher. But you always retain your moral rights to be identified as the author. 

=> Free to access does not mean the work is copyright free. The creator may choose to make their creation freely accessible via the web but this does not mean you have the right to copy (download) and share it. But you may link to it.

The creative works protected by copyright:

• Literary works – books, novels, journal articles, poems, song lyrics, newspaper articles, user manuals, exam papers
• Dramatic works – opera, ballet, screen plays
• Musical works – musical scores but the lyrics which are considered literary works
• Artistic works – paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, maps, diagrams, architecture
• Film – reproducible moving images such as cinema films, home videos or DVDs of television programmes
• Typographical arrangements – a published edition of a literary, musical or dramatic work. It protects the layout and design of a publication.
• Broadcasts – transmitted images sound or information that can be received by members of the public
• Sound recordings - recorded original songs, advert or film soundtracks, instrumental music
• Computer programmes and code.
• Databases.

How long does copyright protection last?
Copyright protections lasts for a specified length of time only and this length varies depending on the type of material produced. Usually this is:

• For a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work usually 70 years from the end of the year in which the author died.
• Copyright in a sound recording, broadcast and cable programmes expires 50 years from the end of the year in which it was made.
• Films are protected for 70 years after death of the last to die of the director, the author of the screenplay/dialogue or the composer of the music created for and used in the film.
• Copyright in a published edition/typographical arrangement expires 25 years from the end of the year in which the edition was first published. For example copyright in War and Peace has expired - but a new imprint of the book will have copyright protection for 25 years.
• Foreign works - usually "the UK does not provide protection to foreign works, where the protection in the country of origin has ended. If the work is still within copyright in the country or origin, the work is protected in the UK, as if it were a UK work. See these UK Government pages. 
• Material published on the web is covered by copyright - unless explicitly stated otherwise.

Unpublished material is also protected by copyright. 

This guidance is for the UK