Copyright and Intellectual Property

Copyright is a legal right that protects fixed creative works such as books, journals, letters, notes, images, drawings, musical works, films, sound recordings, computer code. In the UK it is governed by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. It is one of a suite of intellectual property rights that includes patents, trademarks, designs rights, and confidential information and know-how.

University of Sheffield material include but are not limited to: presentations, lecturer notes, recordings of lectures. There is also copyright in other content that you will use during the course of your study, such as academic books and journal articles.

Your Responsibilities as a Student

Your use of third party copyright material must comply with UK law. Further information about this can be found here.

Additionally, your reuse of material should be fair and considerate to creators. There is overlap between complying with copyright, and good academic practices such as referencing and attribution. Unless permitted to do so, you must not copy and distribute material which you do not own. This includes sharing journal articles, and uploading TUoS material to external websites.

Further Resources

• Refencing

• Your rights and responsibilities

The University is keen to promote, support and celebrate student ideas and in 2011/12 moved to a position where students would normally own the intellectual property created by them during their programme of study. Certain modules are exempt from this policy such as modules in which the intellectual property is generated as a result of collaborative work, for example with other students or with members of staff (or where the work being undertaken derives from the Intellectual property of staff). The exempt modules at Sheffield School of Architecture are listed below. If you are unsure about this speak to your specific module leader.

ARC125, ARC126, ARC136, ARC155, ARC175, ARC225, ARC226, ARC237, ARC238, ARC311, ARC312, ARC322, ARC325, ARC326, ARC337, ARC356, ARC550, ARC551, ARC552, ARC554, ARC556, ARC560, ARC561, ARC562, ARC566, ARC584, ARC594, ARC596, ARC696, ARC6814, ARC6815, ARC6816, ARC6817, ARC6978, ARC6981, ARC6982, ARC6983, ARC6984, ARC6985

Digital archive

All work in the School is to be archived digitally. Students will be required to produce a copy digitally of their work in PDF format for the school archive. Students should bear this in mind when they hand-in formal submissions. This will include live projects, design projects, sixth year design, technology and management reports and dissertations. Selected work will also be required in PDF format. In order to produce this work Acrobat professional with a distiller or PDF writer will be available on university computers.