Law lesson 3- Copyright

For our third law lecture of year 3, Peter Hodges, former head of copyright at the BBC, took the lecture to give his expert knowledge of the subject. This is an area that we deal with day in day out when producing bulletins for WINOL, and a subject that we will continue to deal with throughout our career.

The first point that Peter Hodges made was that anything you create or make has your copyright and is yours and therefore no one else can claim copyright on it, therefore you do not need to ask permission for, or pay for any artistic or creative work that is yours because you have created it.

Copyright covers artistic work,sound, TV, architecture, fonts, logos, designs and paintings to name only a few and over time from the beginning of copyright in 1640, the number of items covered under copyright has increased.

The reason for copyright is to protect the work of your work or the work of the company you are working for, from other copying what you have created. Your work can only be protected if it has been published; been made available to the public, either spoken, written or mechanically. Copyright lasts until the author of it does, plus 70 years after that.

Artistic works also include pictures, designs and graphics.

One example of copyright that took me by surprise is that pictures of the illuminated Eiffel Tower are subject to copyright by the lighting company who installed the lights surroundings the tower since 2003. However for  private holiday photos it is unlikely that you are ever going to be questioned by the company about your photos, but commercial photos of the illuminated tower are subject to copyright. It was also mentioned that when taking videos or pictures, listening out for background music is very important because any copyrighted music effects you if it is in your published piece. This includes at football matches when fans of a team are singing chants that are songs with copyright. Consent to use the music must be gained before it is aired.

Fair dealing is used when reviewing works. Using  a piece of someone else's work is okay if it is for the purpose of review. It can also be used for private or personal research or study and you don't have to acknowledge the copyright or the person who own it. it covers literary  dramatic and artistic work but not pictures. This is something that I was unaware of and I will now be careful when using pictures under fair dealing. Consent must be gained when using a photograph, however it is always better to use your own pictures. I was also surprised at the length of time that a clip can be used under fair dealing; up to 2 minutes, I always believed it was only a few seconds.

The author of any piece of work that is copyrighted has moral rights which they can request which are; the right to be acknowledged, the right not to be subject to derogatory treatment and the author can therefore object to their work being used. There is also the right to privacy over certain pictures and films.

We also learnt that £500,000 is a cheap amount to have to pay for a copyright lawsuit. The hobbit pub is an example of a company being sued because of a copyright issue as a result of not asking the permission of the copyright holder, to use the names of characters belonging to the books and films of The Hobbit. ITN at its worst used a clip a game uploaded from you tube and aired it as a past historical event and were sued for breach of copyright. Finally TV Shock a free video website breached copyrighted of films are were also sued, showing the dangerous nature of breaching copyright.

Turn it in plagiarism website detects copies of students work and matches it to copies on the internet, and is an example of how easy it is to find out if work has been copied.

In news pieces if you hear music playing in the background it is better to turn it off or down in natural sound that use if as so that is clear to hear as this runs the risk of breaching copyright. Adverts in the background and labels on food need to be taken into account when creating a piece of work as they are also subject to copyright.