That's a lot of money, but in comparison to years and years of legal fees it was probably a wise decision. Copyright cases tend to drag on quite unpleasant - the patent war between Apple and Samsung has been trailing for close to two years now.
What is copyright?
Copyright is the legal protection of work done. It can be physical (a garden shed) or intellectual (an article) and it has to be original and substantial to qualify. Time is valuable, and so the work done is valuable - it's to the detriment of the creator if someone steals this work and unfairly benefits from their labour.
This legal protection doesn't extend to ideas - you can't copyright an idea. Not everyone understands this, and it can lead to very silly situations wherein one blogger threatens another over their use of the word 'blogumentary.' You can't copyright an entire genre. It's why it's fine for supermarkets to produce knock off versions of brand products as long as the packaging doesn't try to pass it off as the real thing. The same applies to intellectual and creative property - you can 'adapt' (read: steal) someone's idea because that isn't a crime - but heavily insinuating that your version is the real thing and drawing in users, viewers and readers under that guise is a crime.
Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, copyright protects any literary, dramatic, artistic or musical work, sound recording, film, broadcast, or typographical arrangement. This copyright doesn't have to be formally registered but it is a good idea to assert copyright in a piece to dissuade anyone from assuming it is free to use.
Copyright lasts for 70 years from the end of the authors death.
Copyright in a broadcast is retained for 50 years.
In 2008, the Government said it was considering extending the copyright of sound recordings from 50 to 70 years as well.
Copyright can apply to some pretty weird stuff. Peter Hodges gave us a guest lecture on the topic, and told us that the lighting arrangement on the Eiffel Tower is in fact protected under copyright, and that if an image is commercially published of the illuminated Eiffel Tower then the publisher is in breach of copyright.
Peter also gave us some guidance on the music in the background of sport matches and 'incidental inclusion' - if the music is too identifiable then its some legally shaky ground, but it still is a part of the natural sound of the story the reporter has gone to cover. Shoving music on top of an unrelated package just to jazz it up, however, is completely out of the question.
Copyright doesn't apply at all to research or private study. As students that's great news, but as journalists this doesn't effect us because the every day aim is to have everything you produce widely published.
Case study
The Hobbit is a pub in Southampton which earlier this year hit the headlines when Hollywood film firm the Saul Zaentz Company threatened them with legal action over use of Lord of the Rings names and characters.
They said that if the The Hobbit wanted to continue trading normally, then they must be properly licensed to use the name and keep the decor.
This story produced a widespread kneejerk reaction from the public and several celebrities over the attitude of the 'big bad guys' trying to bully a small independent little pub. All of that and my own personal feelings about how much I like the pub aside, from a legal point of view The Hobbit are in the wrong.
Why? The decoration and merchandise has pictures and paintings of characters from the film all over it. Not the artist's impression of what they imagined the characters look like in the books; it's definitely Ian McKellen and Elijah Wood. The film company paid for those actors to appear in the films and so all images of them relating to the film belong to it. The work done, therefore, belongs to Warner Brothers and nobody else.
Morally, I think that SZC should probably just let it go, but that's absolutely worthless in a court of law.
Getting around copyright
- Make things yourself. If you've taken your own picture or shot your own footage, then you can do whatever you want with it. You can store it in an archive for later so that you and other reporters can recycle it if you're ever stuck for picture in the future.
- Buy it from someone else. Lots of newspapers and bulletins pay agencies for their content if they have nothing of their own to use.
- Fair dealing. The test for whether fair dealing is indeed fair is to ask yourself if your story will be impossible to tell without the content you want. If you can reasonably tell the story without it, then you can reasonably assume that fair dealing won't hold up as a defence in court.
- Be the BBC and have >70 years of archive footage of everything, ever.
Fair dealing
Graham and Ewan's WINOL Games is a review show that's held up as having excellent examples of fair dealing. They do it by the book: every clip of a game they use is clearly attributed to the publishers, is only a few seconds long, and they'll usually speak over it.
Hell, let alone crediting the publishers, the text overlay even tells you how much it costs and where you can buy it.
The crux is this - they wouldn't be able to create the show without the minimal game footage. Another important point is you're not watching their show so you can watch uninterrupted footage of a game so you don't have to buy it (that'd be weird, but if it were a film review show, this would make more sense.)
No - you watch the show for Graham and Ewan's fair and honest reviews on a new game they've played so that you can make an informed decision on whether you want to buy it yourself. That's exactly the purpose of a review - it's a journalist going out and sampling some of these consumer products and relaying their impressions back to you, because it's impossible for even for obscenely rich people to go out and buy every single version of every single item just to test them all out. Reviewers are serving a public duty, like all other journalism should.
Photographs are exempt from fair dealing. If a newspaper steals an exclusive picture from another newspaper, then under Section 30 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 they are open to litigation.
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