- Priorities for European Union Copyright Reform: Copyright for Knowledge briefing, February 2016.
- Views on the Proposed Directive on Copyright in the Single Digital Market: Copyright for Knowledge's response to a call for views on modernising the European copyright framework by the UK Intellectual Property Office, December 2016.
Communications and Briefings
Contact
Email copyright@ucl.ac.uk
Training
- Complete the Copyright Essentials online tutorial
- Book a copyright training session
- See all copyright training on offer
Copyright blog
Update on Copyright support for UCL students and staff
- The UCL Library Services Copyright team is currently working remotely. We are still available to assist with copyright enquiries from UCL students and staff specifically, so please do feel to contact us by emailing: Copyright@ucl.ac.uk We will be checking those emails regularly, but we will also be working non-standard hours for the time being so please bear with us if it takes a while to reply to your questions.
DSM Copyright Directive will not be implemented in the UK
The Minister responsible for intellectual Property, Chris Skidmore has stated very clearly that the UK Government has no intention of implementing the EU Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive.
CLA data collection January 2020
The Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) will be conducting a photocopying data collection exercise at UCL in January 2020 for six weeks.
UCL holds a CLA Higher Education licence and it is part of our licence agreement that they occasionally undertake this survey; the last was held at UCL in 2010. The purpose of the exercise is for the CLA to gather information to inform how they redistribute money to authors and publishers: it is also referred to as a ‘Royalties data’ exercise.
CLA licence update
The Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) Higher Education licence enables staff at UCL to digitise or photocopy readings for teachin
Library copyright exceptions: New SCONUL briefing paper
SCONUL have published a new briefing paper on the library exceptions to copyright with a very clear explanation of the exceptions which permit libraries to supply copies upon request to members of the public and to other not-for-profit libraries (broadly Sections 41 to 43 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988).
Joint Authorship: Recent case sheds light the test for joint authorship
A recent case heard by the Court of Appeal, Kogan v. Martin sheds light on the test which the court needs to apply to decide whether someone is in fact a “joint author” of a work.
Letters and copyright in the news
One of the issues faced regularly by archives which hold the correspondence of a prominent person is that the letters will have multiple copyright owners. Copyright in a letter belongs to the author and typically there will be many authors. This becomes an issue when you need permission to digitise or publish letters from the archive.
Kraftwerk sampling in the Court of Justice of the European Union
Members of the veteran electronic music group, Kraftwerk (Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider-Esleben) have an answer from the CJEU to their claim that copying extracts from their recordings to be used in other musical recordings in the form of “sampling” should only be carried out with their permission. The case which concerns the sampling of a brief extract from their song “Metall auf Metall” which was then played as a continuous loop in a 1999 song produced by Moses Pelham and Martin Haas and performed by Sabrina Setlur called “Nur mir”. The CJEU case number is C-476/17.
Author power
An interesting blog post by Shaun Khoo on the Scholarly Kitchen website takes a sceptical look at whether academic authors are likely to gain more leverage in an open access publishing environment. With current publishing models, the publisher is generally in a more powerful position and the author at a disadvantage in any negotiation. Is that likely to change?
Translations and copyright
A recent enquirer asked about producing a digital version of a book which included two contributions in English by well know Czech political figures. Both the authors had died before 1949. Given that the usual copyright term of the author’s lifetime plus 70 years would apply, it follows that the published works of both authors are out of copyright in the UK (and the EU generally), so both contributions may be digitised and made available without permission.