The Freedom of Information Act 2000 was passed with the intention of making public authorities in the UK more accountable and transparent. It creates a general right of access for individual citizens to information held by public bodies. This is the piece of legislation which Tony Blair famously regretted – according to his published memoirs. The duty to provide information is very wide ranging but does have a list of exemptions, especially in relation to personal information on living individuals. UCL comes within the scope of the Act, so we have a duty to answer FOI requests appropriately.

Just this week a copyright question came along which also includes aspects of FOI and that led me to discover the existence of UCL’s excellent FOI service and to contact Alex Daybank of Legal Services, who is responsible for addressing Data Protection and FOI questions.    If you are within UCL and you have any questions about FOI please feel free to contact Alex via the dedicated FOI email address: foirequests@ucl.a.c.uk

Guest blog post from:  Elizabeth Lawes, Subject Librarian: Fine Art, History of Art & Film Studies, UCL Library Services.

For Art and Film Studies students, newspapers are an excellent source of exhibition and film reviews, interviews, obituaries etc. Alongside this wealth of text based resources, I am often asked the best place to find recent multimedia material. On a fact finding mission to find out about News and multimedia resources at the BL, I attended a workshop on the Television and Broadcast News Service , now available in the recently established St Pancras Newsroom.

The British Library has been collecting printed news since 1869 but, with many publications developing significant online content, has branched out into archiving .uk websites as part of the Legal Deposit UK Web Archive. This archive includes many news based sites and can be accessed on computers in the BL Reading Room (the smaller Open UK Web Archive is a collection of selected websites archived since 2003 with permissions to make freely available online). In addition to the web archives, in 2010 the BL started recording television and radio news broadcasts from channels free to air in the UK; to date, approximately 50,000 news programmes have been recorded from 22 channels and, currently, 60 hours of television and 22 hours of radio are being recorded every day. Channels include BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Al-Jazeera English, France 24, CNN, and Sky News. Often, programmes are available within hours, or even minutes, of broadcast. At least two channels are recorded 24/7, allowing the tracking of breaking news. During significant news events (e.g. the death of Osama Bin Laden), every channel is blanket recorded on a 24 hour basis.

Copyright restrictions mean that the searchable archive can only be accessed onsite at the British Library via the Broadcast News Service, but details of the content can be accessed via the BL’s main catalogue. Following recent updates to the CLA licence, multimedia materials are subject to the same controls as printed materials; it is entirely feasible that the BL will soon be dealing with requests from researchers for extracts of up to 5% of a news broadcast for use in their research. They have yet to devise a practical way to comply.

Once in a while a group of UCL students and/ or staff suggests starting a film club. Films could be shown on the premises, free of charge to people who choose to join the club, perhaps films with a departmental interest or popular feature films.

Great idea, but first there are the copyright and licensing hurdles. Among the acts restricted by copyright is the performance of works, including film, without permission of the copyright owners.

There is an exception for showing film for “the purposes of instruction” in Section 34 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This would not cover showing a film for entertainment or any other purpose outside the teaching context. It is clear that a film club would not be covered.

There is a licensing solution, the Public Video Screening Licence (PVSL) from Filmbank . As cost is based on numbers of people “with access to the licensed premises”, it would not be practical to obtain a UCL wide licence, but individual departments could and sometimes do apply. Filmbank can also licence one-off showings. You may also need a licence from PRS to cover playing the musical soundtracks.

The repertoire licensed by Filmbank covers a range of major film studios, listed on their web site. Many well known feature films would be covered. If your interests are more specialised Filmbank may not be very relevant. If the films are outside the repertoire you will be infringing copyright  even armed with your Filmbank licence. It may come down to seeking permission for each film.

The Fair Dealing test has been mentioned before in this blog. The majority of the recently updated exceptions to copyright rely upon this test and so it is in the spot light, although it was already an established concept in UK Copyright law.

In contrast to the concept of “fair use” in US copyright law, which can be applied generally, “fair dealing” in UK copyright law is only relevant in the context of the statutory exceptions. It is a test of whether we are applying the exception correctly and therefore of whether we can rely upon it for protection.

The UK Intellectual Property Office say: “There is no statutory definition of fair dealing – it will always be a matter of fact, degree and impression in each case. The question to be asked is: how would a fair-minded and honest person have dealt with the work?”* Therefore it will always depend upon the context, but two key questions will generally apply:

• Could we be damaging the copyright owner’s interests by our use of their work? For example by producing something in direct competition?
• Are we using more of their work than is really necessary in the particular circumstances.

By way of example, copying an extract for the purposes of setting an examination may be fair dealing whereas reproducing the same material in a published work under the Quotation exception (which applies from 1^st October)might not be fair dealing.

*IPO (2014),Exceptions to Copyright: Guidance for creators and copyright owners

Increasingly we are being asked how individuals can assert or register copyright in their work. Assuming that you are not publishing with journal or book publisher (or on a recognised web site, etc.), you will retain all rights in your work. In the UK there is no need to register copyright. This is because it automatically arises as soon as a work is recorded in a perceptible format, e.g. a written manuscript, a photograph, work of art, etc.
You may want to identify a work as your own by using the standard copyright symbol © followed by your name and the date the work was created. You may also want to consider applying a Creative Commons Licence to your work to make it clear what types of re-use you will permit.

Commercial services to register copyright do exist. However these services will make a charge to do something that UK Legislation does for creators automatically. The Author’s Licensing and Collecting Society do provide some suggestions of how you might want to ensure that you have proof that you are the creator of a work should there ever be any legal issues: http://www.alcs.co.uk/Authors–rights/All-about-copyright/Registering-copyright

Yesterday we received a query from a colleague wanting to use an image  from the film Apocalypto (2006) to illustrate their research on a departmental website. Making use of a still from a film in this way does require permission from the copyright owner as it involves republishing the image on a public site and so is not covered by fair dealing exemptions relating to criticism and review. The issue with this query was more how to track down the rights owner to obtain the permission.

The film was made by Touchstone Pictures, which is part of the Disney. Much searching of the Disney website turned up only a general email contact for press related enquiries, to which a speculative email was sent, and a postal address for the Disney Rights in Burbank, California. Much to our surprise a response arrived from the Clearance Administrator for the Walt Disney Company advising that rights to the film were owned by Icon Distribution, so a request was made to them for permission and we await their response.

Along the way though, I discovered a very helpful resource for tracing rights for US materials: http://cocatalog.loc.gov And a great deal of information about US copyright on the US Copyright Office webpages: http://www.copyright.gov/

Yes, this query is made up. But we wanted to start this FAQ/Copyright blog with an entry that outlines what happens when a query does arrive and how we work to find an answer.

We ask for as much detail as possible for a reason, almost every case is unique and we will sometimes consult with other copyright advisors or copyright bodies to seek further opinions or clarification. It is useful then to have all the specific details to hand.

Unfortunately, we do often come back with a negative. Legislation has been slow to catch up with technology and how education is exploiting this. So the kind of use that we would like to make of materials is often simply not permitted legally without permission.

Once we receive your query we will be in touch (usually by email) within a couple of days, hopefully with an answer or to advise you that we need to do some more research or pass the query on to be dealt with.

All our advice comes with the familiar disclaimer: “our advice is based on local expertise and widely adopted best practice. Neither these pages, not any advice provided by UCL Library Services staff constitute legal advice”.

We will also be anonymising queries to add to this blog to build a bank of FAQs for other colleagues to refer to. If you would rather we didn’t then please let us know.