Copyright considerations

Copyright is a set of rights held by the creators of original works, which they can sell or transfer to others. Copyright can cover written work (literary and non-literary); dramatic, musical or artistic work; broadcasts; sound and film recordings; and the layout of published editions. How long it lasts depends upon the type of work being copyrighted, but it may extend up to 70 years after the death of the creator.

Copyright prevents anybody else from reproducing or distributing the work, unless they have been given permission by you or the reproduction/distribution is covered by a copyright exception. Violation of copyright can lead to serious consequences. Either you personally or the university corporately may be sued and it may lead to disciplinary action being taken against you.

Luckily, the university owns a number of copyright licences and there are copyright exceptions allowing use of copyrighted resources for educational purposes, so it is easy to avoid violating the law. Here are a few helpful tips and tricks you can follow to make sure all your teaching material is copyright-compliant:

• If you are uploading portions of books or journal articles to a Blackboard course, do not include more than the portion allowed by our CLA copyright licence. For books this is one chapter or 10% (whichever is greater); for journal articles it is two journal articles from a single issue or 10% (whichever is greater).

• If the university has an electronic subscription to an entire book or issue of a journal, you can still link to that – the restriction only covers what you can upload.

• If you want to upload something from a book or journal article, get the Library’s Scanning Service to do it for you. Not only will this save you the work, but they will check that it is covered by our copyright licence and include the required cover sheets to comply with licence.

• If you wish to include more than 10% of a volume, you can also contact the Scanning Service about that – they may be able to arrange an additional content licence for this.

• Where possible, make use of work released under Open Access licences. Works covered by these licences can be freely reproduced, provided you credit the author and comply with any other minor restrictions the licence might impose (see below the image has a CC0 licence, which is a public domain dedication)

• When using images in your course, always credit the creator:

Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Using images from textbooks will ordinarily be OK, as will using non-copyrighted images. If you wish to include a copyrighted image that is not from a textbook, this may be possible under the copyright exception for teaching, but only if including the image is necessary to illustrate a point to the students.

• When linking to Youtube, ensure that the content you are linking to does not infringe copyright. The easiest way to ensure this is to link only to videos uploaded by verified accounts (identified by a grey tick next to their usernames.)

If you have further questions about copyright, consult the university’s Copyright Guidance. If you need further assistance, contact the Copyright Officer.