Intellectual property dilemmas

I recently attended a very good free briefing entitled “Managing and protecting intellectual property and digital dilemmas”, which was run by Eversheds solicitors. I can recommend this session to everyone – it was an eye opener and a useful way of guarding against complacency when it comes to intellectual property; the next sessions are in Leeds and Newcastle.

Below are some of the key messages I took from the session and some resources you might find useful.

By Citizensheep on Flickr

It’s now much easier to break the law and you’re more likely to be caught

Web technologies make it much easier to share your own, and re-use other people’s materials, but also make it easier to infringe copyright. E-learning materials can have many elements, all of which may have a different copyright status (e.g. sound track, images, recordings of students, script etc.) and it can be very difficult to determine who has the rights to what.

Record keeping 
As you use different materials and combine them together to create new resources, keep a record of the copyright owners concerned and any permissions (or attempts to gain permission) you get, or licenses which apply. Once a piece of work is completed, it can be very difficult to unpick this information.

Performers’ rights
As library staff, we’re accustomed to copyright issues relating to text-based materials, but it’s easy to overlook other rights, such as those of performers – these become an issue when using video or still images of students or staff.

Permitted acts
If you work in an educational institution, there are some permitted acts, or exceptions in law, but these are tightly defined. Eversheds made the point, that unfortunately the law often hasn’t kept pace with technology, so some of these permissions are quite out of date and therefore of little use:

• Fair dealing:  use for research and private study, criticism or review, reporting current events
• Visually impaired persons
• Educational purposes
• Libraries and archives [section 18.5 of linked document]

Know your licenses
Learning providers have access to a variety of licensing schemes which they can buy into, but these give only limited additional rights and usually for non-commercial purposes only. These licenses are changing all the time and some are being extended, so it’s worth keeping up to date by subscribing to any newsletters or email alerts from licensing organisations:

By woody1778a on Flickr

• Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA)
• Educational Recording Agency (ERA)
• Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA)
• Creative Commons

Use available expertise
This is such as complex subject, it’s essential to use the expertise available (especially if you have responsibility for copyright at your organisation!) and insist on appropriate training for yourself. Your Principal or other Chief Executive usually has final responsibility for legal issues and if unsure, these questions should be referred to him/her to seek legal advice.


Policies
Intellectual property rights touch on many areas of your organisation and shouldn’t just be left to the library to monitor and manage. A key point made was that there are a range of interest groups involved, such as IT services, personnel (copyright in work while employed is owned by the employer, unless contracts state otherwise), curriculum leaders and learning technologists/E-learning staff, as well as student services, who have a role in protecting students’ rights.


Resources

• Web2rights is a really useful set of resources funded by JISC, including diagnostic tools, flow charts, explaining what steps you need to take when creating resources and a useful animation, explaining many of the issues. The project has also produced a short, interactive course using Xerte.
• JISC Legal are the lead JISC Service on legal matters and a good starting point – their helpdesk will respond to specific queries.
• General Copyright Guidance  Graham Davies has been updating this site for many years (last updated 19th April, 2011!). It introduces the topic well and has many useful links and practical tips (e.g. So What about YouTube?).
• The UK Intellectual Property Office website has some useful resources and links to courses. Their Copyright Essential reading is just that and in plain English.