Copyright is firmly established in the world of commerce and industry, in large part because of the protection it gives to computer software. For many businesses, copyright represents a large part of their value and for that reason alone demands care and attention.
In this article, our copyright solicitors explain what copyright protection is, what copyright protects and how long copyright protection lasts in the UK.
Contents:
- What is copyright protection?
- Who can own copyright?
- Joint ownership of copyright
- Who owns the copyright to a website?
- How can you detect if your website content is being stolen?
- How long does copyright protection last in the UK?
- What can be protected by copyright?
- What rights does copyright protection grant?
- Are there any exceptions or limitations to copyright protection?
- How do I prove copyright ownership?
- How do I obtain copyright protection for my work?
- How can I protect my copyright internationally?
- Summary
What is copyright protection?
Copyright is a bundle of rights, which gives legal substance not only to the original work of creative individuals but also to the products of businesses that exploit those original works – record companies, film studios, broadcasters, and publishers.
Copyright comes into existence as soon as someone who is entitled to protection creates something that copyright can protect. There is no need to register, and no fee to pay, but that means that it’s not possible to find out who owns copyright by looking at the register, as you could do with a patent. Copyright protection is dependant on the copyright owner being able to produce a paper trail to show it exists, and who owns it.
Who can own copyright?
The rules about who can own copyright are generous because they are based on the principle that countries will protect foreign copyright owners in the same way that they protect their own citizens. This so-called “national treatment” rule is embodied in conventions and treaties to which nearly all the countries of the world are party. Because copyright is automatic, it’s essential that the international system works like this.
So, any natural or legal person – individuals and companies – from just about anywhere in the world can own copyright under UK law – and simultaneously under French, US, Chinese or other copyright law.
The author of the work is the first owner of copyright. They can transfer the copyright to someone else – in fact, they can divide it out between numerous transferees if they wish. A novelist could give the hardback rights to one publisher, the paperback rights to another, translation rights to someone else, and film rights to a studio.
The exception to this rule is if the author is an employee and creates the work in the course of their employment. In that situation, the employer becomes the first owner of copyright automatically and there is no need for a transfer of the right.
Joint ownership of copyright
We are accustomed to people owning property jointly with someone else, and copyright is no different. Two or more people might work together to create something, and both be regarded as “authors” (copyright law uses the word to cover all sorts of creative people, not just writers). In that case, they are both the first owners of copyright and are joint owners of intellectual property.
Who owns the copyright to a website?
Copyright can protect websites at two levels. First, the content of the website – text, images, audio, video, software, databases – is likely to have its own protection. Then the big question is whether that copyright remains with the creator, or has passed to the owner of the website. Was the text, for example, written by an employee in the course of their employment? A photo might have been taken by an employee, but were they employed at the time – and if so, was the photo taken outside the course of their employment (so the copyright remains theirs)? Where content has been created by a freelancer, has the website owner taken an assignment of the copyright? And if other third-party content has been included, did the website owner have permission to do so?
The second level of protection applies to the website as a whole. Copyright law does specifically protect compilations, and while that isn’t how most people would think of websites it does make sense to treat them under this heading. A site is a collection of individual elements, some of which might be protected by copyright and some of which might not, but the whole compilation taken together, if sufficiently original, could have a claim to copyright protection. Who would own the copyright? That would be the proprietor of the website, the person who assembled all the parts of the site – the website designer, perhaps, or an employee of the company running the site. Putting assignments in place, to ensure that the copyright is in the right hands, is clearly going to be important here.
How can you detect if your website content is being stolen?
If you’ve created everything on your website yourself, or had it done by employees or freelancers and taken ownership of the copyright, you haven’t stopped anyone from taking your content. You’ve just put yourself in a position to stop them – if you find them.
There are online tools that can help you detect whether someone has included your material in their own website, and even a straightforward Google search using the first ten words or so of a piece of text (within double quote marks) could lead you to an infringer. Downloadable files, including PDF documents and images, can be copy-protected or digitally watermarked so you can detect when someone uses them without your permission – this is a large part of how picture agencies protect their interests.
If you find someone infringing your copyright, you can sue them for copyright infringement. You might even be able to choose where to sue them: in the US, you could claim statutory damages of $750 to $30,000 per work, which might be vastly more than you could claim as your actual losses in an English court. In the right circumstances – where the unauthorised copy has been posted on a social media platform, for example – a “take down” could stop the problem.
How long does copyright protection last in the UK?
Copyright in original works of authorship – literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works, and films – lasts for the lifetime of the author or authors, and seventy years after. Who owns the copyright is immaterial – the identity of the creator is what matters.
For sound recordings and broadcasts, the rules are different and are 50 years from when the recording or broadcast was made or made public. There’s a special rule for some sound recordings, which are protected for 70 years from when they are released to the public if that is within 50 years after they were made.
What can be protected by copyright?
What UK copyright law protects is set out in a closed list. It is interested only in original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works; films; sound recordings; broadcasts; and the typographical arrangements of published editions.
The requirement for originality is key: copyright is there to protect creativity, not copying. For films, sound recordings, broadcasts and typographical arrangements, the law does not ask for originality but just that it not be copied from an earlier example.
What rights does copyright protection grant?
Copyright confers certain exclusive rights on the owner. These exclusive rights vary from one type of work to another. Copying (or, more accurately, reproducing the work in any material form) is the basic and most obvious one and applies to all manner of copyright works. After that, the exclusive rights are a little more work-specific: a play or a piece of music may be performed, and the law says that’s the exclusive preserve of the copyright owner, while a film may be shown in public and a sound recording may be played in public. In each of those cases, “public” can mean a relatively select group, but those acts done in private are not controlled by copyright. Making a copy is not automatically permitted even if it is only for private use.
The copyright owner also has the right to authorise others to do one or more of the exclusive rights – to grant licences to others to use the copyright. This is how many copyright owners make money from their assets, and for some (composers, for example, and writers) it’s done through collecting societies, so that the creator can carry on creating rather than spend all their time chasing users and selling them licences.
If someone does something to your copyright that you have the exclusive right to do, including doing it to a substantial part (measured qualitatively as well as quantitatively) of your work, they infringe your rights. Then you can take them to court, if you wish, to claim damages and to get injunctions to stop them.
Are there any exceptions or limitations to copyright protection?
Copyright law recognises that it would be overreaching itself if it allowed the copyright owner to stop every use of their work. There are many permitted acts set out in the copyright legislation.
Fair dealing
Several permitted acts are based on the rather nebulous concept of fair dealing, which may be for private study, non-commercial research, reporting current events, parody, instruction, data mining and other purposes. But beware: the law might say you can do these things, but the owner of copyright might not agree that what you are doing amounts to fair dealing – and if they have deep pockets you would be in trouble if they took you to court over it.
Other permitted acts
A wide range of other acts are also permitted, so you can do them without having to ask the copyright owner. Decompiling computer programs is sometimes permitted, to ensure the owner of copyright in an operating system could not monopolise writing programs to run in that operating system. Recording a broadcast so you watch or listen to it at a more convenient time is allowed.
Copyright protection does not extend to ideas
Another major limitation on the extent of copyright protection is that it does not protect ideas. The UK law does not state this, but it is inherent in the fact that copyright protects original works. The original part of a novel or play, for example, is not the basic story, but the writer’s choice of words to tell that story – the underlying ideas have to be free for the next generation of writers to use.
How do I prove copyright ownership?
While there is no official copyright registration system in the UK, a couple of techniques can help if you have to prove ownership of copyright. First, you can avail yourself of a foreign registration system, of which that in the US is the most obvious example. But beware that this entails publishing the work, so if you want to keep it secret that might not be what you need.
An alternative is sometimes referred to as “poor man’s copyright” – if there’s a copy of your manuscript in your solicitor’s safe, or a bank vault, or just in the hands of a trusted third party, preferably sealed in an envelope that has been conveniently dated by the Royal Mail, you are well on the way to being able to prove that it’s your original work and not copied from something that came along later. It’s not a complete solution to the problem of proving ownership, but it gets you several steps closer to being able to do so.
How do I obtain copyright protection for my work?
Apart from taking simple steps to be able to show that you had created your work before a certain date, obtaining copyright is really a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Just create something that copyright will recognise as deserving protection, and provided you qualify for protection (or, sometimes, that your work does), and that’s all there is to it. If you’re a UK citizen you don’t even have to register your work in the US to secure copyright protection there, though there may be advantages to doing so (and it might indirectly help you prove that you have UK copyright).
It’s not a requirement, but a copyright notice comprising the (c) symbol, the owner’s name, and the date of creation, can be a big help. It may deter infringers, who might see it as an indication that you are keen to enforce your rights. Or it might help dispel their ignorance about whether copyright is engaged at all.
How can I protect my copyright internationally?
If you could not easily protect your copyright in other countries it would not be much use. The most important international convention in the field, the Berne Convention, came into being because of the efforts of Victor Hugo (among others), who recognised that he needed something more than just rights in France, and the idea of national treatment was born. As we mentioned earlier, countries that are parties to the copyright conventions agree to give the works of foreign authors the same protection that they give to their own people – and imposing formalities, such as registration or even affixing a (c) notice, is not allowed.
Summary
There are many rules relating to copyright to think about, but what you have to do to make sure your copyright is protected is fairly easy. Failure to take a few basic steps could mean you have no rights to enforce in the first place, or that infringers start ripping you off with impunity, so it’s important to pay attention and get the basics right from the start.
