Copyright101-answers

COPYRIGHT (in NZ) 101 Worksheet This sheet: goo.gl/XfLzuu

Warm-up activities

________________ Basic copyright stuff

Question Your answer ✔ 1 Copyright lasts for how long in NZ…? In most cases it’s 50 years (for sound recordings, films, broadcasts/web works) or life+50 years (written, musical, artistic works).

Copyright does expire but it’s sometimes very difficult to work out, even for experts. We won’t go into it here. Happy Birthday is an interesting recent example. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You

2 Which of these is not subject to copyright: 1. a photo on a blog, 2. notes you took in a seminar, 3. an idea in an essay you wrote, 4. or all of them? It’s c. Copyright protects the medium in which something is expressed, not the thing expressed itself. So, an essay would be protected, not any original ideas in it. Patents are used to protect ideas.

3 What do I do to copyright something I created? The short answer: nothing.

Copyright is automatically granted on creation of a work. You don’t have to write the © symbol or your name or the year (though these are very good things to do).

Note that to qualify under NZ law for copyright protection a work must be ‘original’ in the sense that it originates from the creator and is not copied from another person’s work. It requires independent skill and labour.

Think about a musician playing a Mozart piece: the music is no longer protected by copyright. But the specific arrangement, if original enough, could be and any recording of a performance would be too.

4 If I own ©, I have which of these rights: 1. make copies of a work 2. publish it 3. rent or licence it 4. ‘communicate’ it via broadcast or internet 5. perform or play it 6. adapt it or 7. translate it? It’s all of them. Copyright gives you the sole right to do any of these things, except where specific exceptions are allowed under law (see 6).

Here’s a useful infosheet for more detail: www.copyright.org.nz/viewInfosheet.php?sheet=29

5 True or false: there can be multiple copyright owners in a single work. Absolutely true. If you co-author something the copyright is shared. If someone else asks permission to reuse that thing, all of the copyright owners must give that permission.

So, academic article might have three authors and copyright holders. A recording of a song might have a copyright holder in the music, another in the lyrics, another in the arrangement, another in the performance(s) and another in the recording itself.

6 Does copying someone else’s work always require permission?

No, there are exceptions.

Sometimes we have licences that allow reuse without asking. In other words we have permission up front because we pay a fee. The University Library subscribes for access to journals and ebooks. As an individual you might subscribe to Sky or Netflix. These licences will always come with conditions, e.g. you can only watch Netflix for your own private use; you couldn’t play something from Netflix in public.

More importantly there is fair dealing, which allows use of others’ work for private study/research or for the purposes of criticism, review or news reporting. There’s no magic figure or 10% rule for what you can copy. It’s a question of what is fair in relation to the nature of the thing you’re copying and why you’re copying it. It’s up to you to decide; a copyright holder can challenge you if they think it’s not fair.

More here: nzcommons.org.nz/the-fair-in-fair-dealing

What is fair dealing with copyright material?

7 Bonus question: What is the purpose of copyright? There are a few possible answers here. Nothing in NZ law sets out what the purpose is.

One common answer it’s to provide balance between providing protection to incentivise the creation of new works and allowing users to reuse those works in certain ways.

________________ Ownership Who owns the copyright? Answer ✔ 1 Who owns copyright for things you create as part of your job? The default position under law is that an employer or the commissioner of a work will own the copyright. However, in some cases this is waived by the employer. See: www.otago.ac.nz/administration/policies/otago003229.html

Note that the commissioning rule only applies to a “photograph or the making of a computer program, painting, drawing, diagram, map, chart, plan, engraving, model, sculpture, film, or sound recording.”

2 Who owns copyright in students’ work?

Students. They’re not employed to do their work.

3 You’re a teacher and you ask a student to take a photo of you teaching the class on your phone. Who owns the copyright: you, the student or your employer? Ownership of the actual digital file on your camera won’t necessarily mean that you own the copyright. The creator of something owns the copyright, in this case the student. But you could argue that you’ve effectively commissioned the work by asking for it to be taken.

4 You upload a holiday snap to Twitter or Facebook: who owns the copyright?

Assuming you took the photo on your own time (not for work), it’s yours to upload wherever you like.

If you read the terms of use for Twitter or Facebook or similar sites then you’ll find you do not give them copyright but rather a licence for them to use your copyright. It’s usually a very permissive licence, along the lines of: ‘We can use your stuff for any part of our service that we now offer or might in the future for all time, across the world, without the possibility of you retracting this. This includes any third parties who we work with. Oh, and we can change these terms at any time.’

Note: when you sign up to these sorts of service you also vow that you have the authority to upload anything, i.e. you’re not breaching someone else’s copyright.

5 Who owns the copyright in academic research articles or books?

It depends but most of the copyright in the world’s research is owned by big publishers.

An academic writes it so he or she would own the copyright. Traditionally he or she would then sign copyright over to the publisher so that they could publish it. This means the publisher now has the set of exclusive rights. Some of the contracts signed now explicitly allow certain things like uploading to your own website or an academic networking site.

The point here: you can give away the exclusive set of rights for copying. But actually you can’t give away your ‘moral rights’ to be identified as the creator and to object to derogatory treatment of your work.

However, to counteract the big publishers controlling access to (and charging for) research an Open Access movement has started. Now, many governments and funding agencies around the world are mandating that research is made freely available (at least when paid for with public funds). In such cases often the academics retain their copyright.

6 If three researchers draft an article for publication, who owns the copyright? All three of them equally, unless there’s something else agreed between them.

7 Your department runs a citizen scientist project where the public can upload photos, data and written contributions to your website. Who owns the copyright? If nothing is stated to the contrary in a ‘terms of use’ or similar, the creators would own it. Of course, this might hamper any research that the department might want to do, so it makes sense to clarify who owns what and who can use the material in which ways.

E.g.: Marine Metre Squared.

8 Continuing the scenario from 7, you write a blog post highlighting recent contributions by users of the site. You include a photo by one of your students and some data gathered by a high school class. Who owns the © in this post? You own the parts you wrote; the student would own the © in the photo and the high school class would collectively own the data (probably! - data is a bit more complex since you can’t own facts or statistics but you can for example say that your intellectual input contributed to the structure of that data).

9 If you use an open access licence on your work (e.g. Creative Commons), are you ‘giving away’ your copyright? No. Creative commons licences (like the one on this worksheet) rely on copyright. You keep some of your exclusive rights but give some away so that others can use your work without asking.

Who uses these? data.govt.nz/copyright The Whitehouse Wikipedia Open Access journals, like PeerJ or PLoS Nine Inch Nails Al Jazeera MIT OpenCourseWare It’s an option in YouTube

See: creativecommons.org/who-uses-cc/

________________ Reusing others’ work In the digital age we can reuse and adapt at the click of a button. Read each scenario below and say whether the use is OK or not. For each, ask yourself:

• Is the thing being copied protected by copyright? If it is, who owns it?
• Is the use covered by a licence?
• Is my use covered by fair dealing or another exception in law?
• If none of these covers your use, you should ask the © holder for permission.

Scenario OK or not? ✔ 1 Susan has a private blog in she posts book reviews of recent NZ fiction. She includes short quotes of no more than a paragraph as she discusses the good and bad points of the novels. OK.

Would plainly be fair dealing. The only problem might be if she copied significant moments that meant people might not buy the book. Imagine someone copied all the juicy bits from Dirty Politics. It might just be a series of short quotes but it might mean people didn’t buy the book and the rights holder could object on those grounds.

2 Mike is an undergrad student writing a review of relevant literature in a 300-level sociology paper. In his assignment he includes diagrams from articles he thinks are relevant to his topic. As long as he is specifically critiquing these it is probably fine under fair dealing. If he’s just saving himself some work then it could be a breach of copyright.

3 Mario is a lecturer. He always starts his lectures with a slide of a Larsen cartoon. There is always a Larsen cartoon to suit any topic. No, this is just window dressing. Larsen cartoons are protected by copyright and you’d certainly need to pay to use them.

It’s not for private research and study (he’s showing it to a class) and he’s not critiquing or reviewing the cartoons.

He could just as easily remove them and his lectures would not be affected.

4 Mario puts some students’ essays from last year’s class (with names removed) on Blackboard as exemplars for his students. Did he ask permission? If not, then he’s breaching their copyright. It doesn’t matter that he removed the names. (In fact if he wanted to argue fair dealing then he would have to acknowledge the authors as this is required under law.)

5 Mario is checking out a new book in the library and walks over to the photocopier to make a copy of a chapter so he can read it in more depth and annotate it. Yes, this would be OK under fair dealing for private research and study.

6 Mario thinks his Honours class would benefit from reading the chapter. He makes a clean scan and puts it in Blackboard. Legally speaking this is if his institution has a licence that allows this. The institution might have a practice of putting this in a special reserve system.

7 A student shares his photo of the University Clocktower (with cherry blossoms) on Facebook. Chris, a university administrator, re-shares the photo using Facebook’s share button. Yes, the Facebook terms of use mean that anyone using their service can use anything that anyone else has created on the site.

8 Chris then thinks the photo would make a great background for a poster advertising a departmental staff/student barbeque. No. Now we’re outside of Facebook, so their licence won’t cover this use. You’d have to have a licence that covered this use or an exception under law. But fair dealing won’t cover this because it’s not private study nor is she critiquing or reviewing the photo.

9 Peter is a researcher. He signs a copyright transfer agreement with the publisher of his latest journal article. He uploads the PDF he gets from them to his Academia.edu profile. This is probably not OK, though it will depend on the contract he signed. Some let you retain your copyright (e.g. open access journals). Others ask you to transfer the copyright to the publisher but allow certain uses, like uploading to your departmental website or to an academic networking site.

10 In the scenario described in 7 and 8 of the Ownership page, if you wanted to reuse the photo in the blog post, who would you ask?

If the site had a Creative Commons licence you don’t need to ask, the permission has been granted already, as long as you follow the terms of the licence. But if the site had no statement about rights then you’d probably need to contact both the site owners and the student who took the photo.

11 You find a photo via Google search that you want to use in an email about an upcoming staff/student barbeque that will go to all staff and students. Most of the internet is all rights reserved copyright. You can use filters on Google search to identify things you can reuse under open licences.

________________ Resources / further reading What is copyright? www.otago.ac.nz/administration/copyright/otago016308.html University of Otago IP Rights Policy www.otago.ac.nz/administration/policies/otago003229.html Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand (including CC kiwi video) creativecommons.org.nz Creative Commons licence chooser creativecommons.org/choose/ Twitter terms of use twitter.com/tos Monkie selfie www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/22/monkey-business-macaque-selfie-cant-be-copyrighted-say-us-and-uk

Richard White | Manager Copyright & Open Access | University of Otago | @rkawhite | copyright@otago.ac.nz This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.