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Introduction to copyright and licensing
Copyright is a type of protection for your intellectual property, i.e. the work you create. Creations include literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, films, sound recordings and broadcasts. In the UK copyright is an automatic right granted at the time of creation, and it determines how others can use your work.
You can transfer or give away your copyright, for example to a book publisher, and it can belong to an individual or a group of people, such as an employer if it is created during the course of your employment. Copyright law aims to juggle the rights of the creator to protect their work with the rights of the user to re-use the work. In the UK copyright protection lasts for 70 years from the death of the author (or last surviving author if there is more than one), with some exceptions. Beyond that time users are able to copy, modify and distribute material with fewer restrictions. Facts and ideas are not copyrightable. If ideas are expressed in a tangible form then they come under copyright protection.
Understand the underlying principles of copyright, and learn more about Creative Commons licences and public domain tools.
Copyright and other forms of intellectual property:
Intellectual property (creative outputs) can be protected in a number of different ways. Copyright is one type, which is applied automatically. Others include patents, designs and trade marks and each of these must be applied for. These additional protections are used for inventions, brand names and product design. Protection by these additional measures in the UK is not in place until the application has been successful. An individual work could fall under one or more of these protection measures.
Copyright and Creative Commons:
In its default 'all rights reserved' form copyright means that other people are not able to copy, modify, or distribute your work without your permission. You may, however, choose to use 'some rights reserved' by applying a Creative Commons licence and specifying how others can use your work, or perhaps you may choose to dedicate your work to the public domain.
Find out how to legally use someone else's work, the types of 'permission', and how to provide credit and attribution to the original creator.
Learn how to apply a licence to your own work, and how to licence your adaptations and collections of other people's work.
Further resources:
Further resources:
Creative Commons sharing your work
Creative Commons reusing others' work
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