Copyright for Students
What Can I Copy?
As a student, you are allowed to make limited copies (including scans and photocopies) of copyrighted works for research and private study. You may only make copies for personal use and may not distribute them to others. The copies you make should not generally comprise more than one article or chapter from a volume, or 10% of the total work, whichever is larger.
How Can I Use Copyrighted Work?
Any other work which you use in your own work should be cited, whether or not it is copyrighted. When you are quoting somebody’s else’s work in your own work, copyright is not usually likely to be a problem. You only need to worry about this if you are quoting such a large amount of the work (e. g. the entirety of a poem) that it detracts from the market for the original work. If your own work is not publicly available, this threshold is unlikely to be met.
If you wish to include logos or copyrighted images in theses or dissertations, they must ensure that they have permission to do so from the copyright/trademark holders. Advice on obtaining permission can be found elsewhere in this guide, or you can contact the Copyright Officer.
Who Owns the Copyright in My Work?
You own the copyright over the work you produce as a student. The university retains the right to hold copies of research theses produced by students in physical and/or digital format, but it does not claim the copyright over them and the student is free to transfer this copyright if they wish to.
Copyright for Lecturers
What Can I Copy?
As an academic, you benefit from the copyright licences which the university holds and from a number of exceptions to copyright law to support teaching. You are allowed to make limited copies (including scans and photocopies) of copyrighted works for research and private study. You may only make copies for personal use and may not distribute them to others. The copies you make should not generally comprise more than one chapter from a book or two articles from the same journal issue, or 10% of the total work, whichever is larger.
If you wish to use copies in your teaching or to upload them to Blackboard, we recommend contacting the library’s Scanning Service. They can make the copies on your behalf and will check at the same time whether the work being scanned is covered by the university’s CLA licence or if additional permissions are required.
What Can I Include in Presentations and on my Blackboard Course?
If the university has an electronic subscription to a journal or owns an e-book, you may link to it directly from a presentation or a Blackboard course (although you should note that some e-books only allow a limited number of students to access the work at the same time.)
You may wish to include scanned copies of journal articles or extracts from books in your Blackboard course. If you wish to do this, contact the library’s Scanning service, who will be able to do the scanning on your behalf, to check copyright compliance and to prepare the required coversheets. You will then be able to upload the completed scan.
If you wish to quote from a book or journal article in your presentations, this will generally be permitted under the exceptions for criticism or for teaching. The quotation must be to illustrate a point or to be criticized and must not undermine the market for sales of the broader work (so quoting a couplet from a poem would be covered by these exceptions, but quoting the entire poem might not be.) You should of course reference and attribute the quotations correctly.
Advice on all aspects of using Blackboard can be found on our continuously updated Blackboard Ultra wiki.
Can I Include Images in my Presentations?
If you are including an image (including photographs) in your Blackboard course or in your presentations, you must check if the image is covered by copyright. This is affected by whether the image is copyrightable and if the image is still in copyright.
A 2023 legal judgement made clear that “What is required is that the author was able to express their creative abilities in the production of the work by making free and creative choices so as to stamp the work created with their personal touch.” This means that images which have some artistic intent are copyrightable, but images which are solely intended as a photorealistic reproduction of an image (eg photographs of paintings which are out of copyright) are not copyrightable.
If an image is copyrightable, copyright persists until 70 years after the death of the author, after which time it enters the public domain and can be used by anybody without permission.
If you are looking for images which are definitely available for re-use, some useful resources are listed at the bottom of this page.
Can I Include Videos in my Presentations or Broadcast them to my Classes?
Most films and TV produced in the UK are covered by the university’s ERA licence and this applies to everything on the Box of Broadcasts website. This allows you to show the broadcasts for educational purposes. A condition of this is that it is only accessible to staff and students of the university. To ensure this, we recommend that it is done through Blackboard.
Further advice on what material can and cannot be included in teaching materials is available from the Copyright Officer.
Copyright for Researchers
Who Owns the Copyright to My Research?
In general, the creator of a work owns the copyright. However, one exception to this is when work is created by an employee in the course of their employment, in which case copyright is owned by the employer. Work produced for the purposes of teaching (notes, teaching materials, etc.) is considered to be created in the course of employment, and hence the copyright is owned by the university.
However, research publications are not classed as work created in the course of employment and copyright over them is owned by the creator(s). The only exception is contract research, which belongs to either the university or the funding body depending upon the terms of the contract.
A copyright owner has the right to transfer ownership of the copyright to somebody else. If you are publishing in a journal, your publisher may ask you to assign the copyright over your work to them. However, this copyright only applies to the version of the work being signed over and any future versions of it (such as the published version). It does not apply to the version of the work accepted for publication and this does not prevent you from depositing a copy of your accepted manuscript in the university’s repository (which is often necessary to make your work eligible for inclusion in the REF.) If you are publishing a book, you will in most cases retain copyright over the work, but the publisher will hold the copyright of the typesetting.
For advice on the publication process, contact the Open Research team in the library or the Research Performance team.
Do I Have to Copyright My Work?
Copyright arises automatically – you don’t have to do anything special for it come into being. If you want your work to be more widely available, you can consider releasing it under an open licence, such as a Creative Commons licence. You can find more details about these licences in the Open Access section.
What Are the Copyright Rules for Theses?
Copyright in theses produced at Ulster University is owned by the student. The university retains the right to hold copies of research theses produced by students in physical and/or digital format, but it does not claim the copyright over them. Most other universities will have a similar policy, but in cases of doubt you should check the copyright policy of the relevant institution.
Copyright and AI
“AI” or Artificial Intelligence refers to the use of computers to perform operations perceived as relating to some aspect of human intelligence. This can include systems which utilize machine learning or generative AI systems, which generate text or images in response to user prompts, based off models constructed from their training data.
The copyright position of different AI systems is unclear and there are a number of lawsuits underway regarding whether specific systems violate copyright and whether individual users or the creator of the AI system are responsible for any such violations.
In addition, copyright laws vary from nation to nation. UK-based models may to some extent be covered by the copyright exception for Text and Data Mining, but this exception does not exist in some other copyright regimes. On the other hand, the defences of the American owners of AI systems in several ongoing lawsuits rest upon the concept of Fair Use, which is important in American copyright law but does not exist in UK law. There is a possibility that different legal jurisdictions will end up with different rules regarding the use of AI.
If you are creating or making use of an AI system and are worried about your copyright liability, please contact the Copyright Officer to discuss this. Similarly, if you are worried that an AI system has made unauthorized of your copyright, the Copyright Officer can offer support.
This area of law is in flux and this guidance will be updated in response to future developments.