‘Education’ by NY

It can be intimidating looking into copyright for the first time and some students put it off until their thesis has already been written.  If you can face the subject head-on before you even start a project you will save time later! Here are a few courses and resources to get started with.

The British Library Business and IP Centre has some great sessions coming up in the next month: many are re-run so visit the British Library events pages to see future sessions.

A free webinar ‘Introduction to Copyright’ is a perfect easy-starter: it is just an hour and can be viewed from your home computer.

The Intellectual Property Office has designed some guidance for students and teachers, found on their IP in Education page.  The IP Tutor course is free and you can work through it in around 40 minutes.

We are sometimes asked about Patients and Trade Marks, which come under the umbrella of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), along with copyright.  This might be a query from a student designing some software as part of their study, or from academics co-creating an app with a colleague or student.  The British Library’s ‘How can I protect a business idea’ is a free, half day workshop which outlines IPR and which rights may apply to your project or business.  This could be a good foundation for more in-depth sessions such as the Mini-Masterclass Copyright for business. I particularly like the look of this session as it covers copyright in everyday situations such as photographs, music, websites.

For more tailored training, our Copyright Support Officer often visits groups of postgraduate students to give an overview of copyright, or talk about copyright in your thesis.  Do get in touch if you would like to arrange a session for your students.

I was recently asked to clarify the copyright considerations when reusing videos from YouTube for teaching. There are a number of issues to examine:

• Anyone can upload a YouTube video, but does that person own the copyright? We can’t assume they do and we should consider this.
• Maybe the person who posted the video does own the copyright, but have they included any other copyright protected works (music, recent artworks etc.). Does it look as though it is infringing?
• Many YouTube videos have a Creative Commons licence attached which allows reuse in many contexts. So once we have clambered over the initial hurdle of copyright ownership, any videos with a CC licence are potentially reusable for teaching purposes as long as we adhere to the licence terms.
• YouTube has its  own detailed terms of service which appear to restrict the user to “personal, non-commercial” use. On the face of it this clashes with the rights granted by CC licences.
• On the other hand YouTube clearly recognises that copyright is owned by the author of the video, so perhaps we can assume that the CC licence chosen by the author  overrides the general YouTube terms of service?