Glossary of Copyright Terms
| Term | Description |
|---|---|
| Attribution | A statement of the author/creator and source of a work. |
| Copyright | An intellectual property right which gives protection to the owner of the rights to an original work. This means that individuals who want to reproduce the original work of others may need to seek permission to do so. |
| Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 | An Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which governs UK copyright law. Small but significant changes were made to copyright exceptions on June 1st 2014. |
| Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) |
A licensing body as defined by the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 which licenses organisations to copy and re-use extracts from print and digital publications on behalf of the rights holders. |
| Creative Commons | Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and share. There are currently over 800 million works available via Creative Commons. |
| Criticism and review | This fair dealing exception permits the use of a work for the purpose of criticism and review provided that the work has been made available to the public. In order for the exception to apply the copying of the work must be truly connected with review and criticism and not purely for illustrative or enhancement purposes. |
| Crown copyright | Copyright in material produced by a British government department belongs to the Crown. The Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) can provide more information about this. |
| Derivative work | An expressive creation that includes major, copyright-protected elements of an original, previously created first work (the underlying work). The derivative work becomes a second, separate work independent in form from the first. The transformation, modification or adaptation of the work must be substantial and bear its author's personality to be original and thus protected by copyright. |
| Digitisation | Conversion of analogue information in any form (text, photographs, voice, etc.) to digital form. |
| Education Recording Agency (ERA) | An organisation that provides licence schemes to member HE institutions to cover the use of recorded broadcast media in teaching and learning. |
| Exceptions | Exceptions to copyright allow limited use of copyright works without the permission of the copyright owner. |
| Fair dealing | In certain circumstances, some works may be used if that use is considered to be 'fair dealing'. There is no strict definition of what this means but it has been interpreted by the courts on a number of occasions by looking at the economic impact of the use on the rights holder. Where the economic impact is not significant, the use may count as fair dealing. |
| Illustration for instruction | This fair dealing exception means that copyright in the work is not infringed by an individual teacher or a student as long as they are copying the work to give or receive instruction (or when preparing to give or receive instruction), and the copying is used to illustrate a point about the subject being taught. This includes material for examination purposes. The exception covers all works, including images, music and video as well as text-based material. The exception only applies if the copying is for non-commercial purposes, is properly attributed/acknowledged and the use is fair (see fair dealing). |
| Infringement | The act of copying, distributing or adapting a work without permission. |
| Licence | An agreement that allows use of a work subject to conditions imposed by the rights holder. |
| Moral Rights | Moral rights are concerned with the protection of the reputation of the author. In particular the right to be attributed for the creation of a work, and the right to object to defamatory treatment. |
| Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) | The NLA licence permits the photocopying and scanning of newspaper articles of all national newspapers and around 80% of local newspapers for the purposes of internal management, education and instruction. |
| Open Access | Open Access (OA) means that items of scholarly work are made available online, in a digital format, at no charge to the reader and with limited restrictions on re-use. Copyright still applies to Open Access work. |
| Orphan work | A work in which copyright exists, but where the rights holder is either unknown or cannot be located. |
| Public Domain | Works in the public domain are those whose intellectual property rights have expired, have been forfeited, or are otherwise inapplicable. |
| Quotation | This fair dealing exception permits use of quotations from copyright works for illustrative purposes. |
| Research and private study | This fair dealing exception allows researchers and students to copy limited extracts of works for non-commercial research and private study. This includes text, images, sound and video recordings. The amount is limited by fair dealing and must be sufficiently acknowledged/attributed. |
| Rights holder | A person or organisation that owns the copyright of a work. This may be the original author, their relatives if deceased or, if they have assigned their copyright, it may be a publisher or other commercial entity purely associated with exploitation of the work. |