What is copyright?
Copyright is a form of intellectual property right, which protects the economic and moral rights of the copyright holder.
The economic rights are the potential to benefit from the creative effort that went into the work. To protect these economic rights, copyright prohibits anybody else from doing any of the following things without the copyright holder’s permission:
- Reproducing the work (eg by photocopying, scanning, transcribing or recording it)
- Distributing the work (whether for free or for profit)
- Performing the work
- Adapting the work
It is possible to sell or hand over your economic rights to another party (known as assigning copyright) or to licence the permission to carry out the prohibited acts. In addition, there are a number of exceptions allowing others to make use of your work which will be discussed elsewhere in this guidance.
Moral rights include the right to have work attributed correctly to the author (and not to have work falsely attributed to you); the right to object to derogatory treatment; and the right to privacy. These rights cannot be sold or handed over but can be waived.
Copyright protection comes into being when you create an original, creative work and it does not have to be registered for you to benefit from its protection.
The following types of work are protected by copyright:
- Original literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work, including illustration and photography
- Original non-literary written work, such as software, web content and databases
- Sound and music recordings
- Film and television recordings
- Broadcasts
- The layouts of published editions of written, dramatic and musical works
Other types of work are not protected by copyright but may be protected by other forms of intellectual property right.
Copyright is time-limited. Where copyright has expired or the copyright holder has renounced all rights over it, a work is said to be in the public domain.
In the UK, copyright is controlled by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Why do I need to worry about copyright?
If you infringe copyright, you are breaking the law. Copyright infringement is usually a civil offence but can become a criminal offence where there are aggravating circumstances. As a student or staff member, you are required to follow the university’s Copyright Policy, which states that infringing copyright may lead to disciplinary sanctions.
There are a number of circumstances where you will need to be aware of copyright regulations and how they affect what you can and cannot do. Some examples include:
- If you are copying or scanning from a book, either for personal study or for inclusion in teaching materials (this includes uploading material to Blackboard)
- If you are reproducing somebody else’s work (eg by using a photograph somebody else has taken in a presentation)
- If you are adapting somebody else’s work (eg by using a dataset created by somebody else as the basis for a new piece of work)
Copyright restrictions will not necessarily stop you from doing this entirely, but it will affect how much use you can make of other people’s work and what you need to do in order to make it lawful.
In addition, any new work created will have copyright applying to it. In the case of works created by staff during the normal course of their employment (such as teaching materials), the copyright for this belongs to Ulster University. In the case of scholarly work produced by academic staff, the copyright belongs to the staff (except for contract research.) In the case of work produced by students, copyright belongs to students.
This guide contains dedicated sections giving advice for students, lecturers and researchers.