Web2Rights content update
February 8th, 2008 by Naomi KornIts last thing on a Friday afternoon and…you can’t settle because you really want to know about the relationship between contracts and copyright. This is actually pretty important stuff because contract law can be used to over-ride copyright law. What this means is that if a third party gives you permission to use their ”stuff”, by means of a licence, they can insert clauses in this contract which could undermine your ability to benefit from the copyright exceptions (Fair Dealing provisions) to which users can legitimately benefit. These are a hard won defence in the UK copyright law by which users can copy other people’s stuff which is in copyright for specific purposes, without having to get permission. The problem is that at the moment, the copyright legislation does not preclude contracts from being used to over ride the copyright exceptions in this way and in real terms, it may be that 90 out of evey 100 contracts issued by third party rights holders, such as publishers, film companies etc may include these clauses.
In response to this, the Web2Rights team has put together a briefing document outlining these issues, the types of clauses which you may encounter (that effectively over-ride the copyright exceptions) and an example of the type of clause that you might wish to include in your agreements with third party rights holders to ensure that your fair dealing provisions etc are not over-ridden. This briefing paper can be found on our IP ToolKit page, together with some further FAQs resulting from our Web20 and IP workshops in York. Over the next few weks, we’ll be adding a top tips page on dealing with licences, as well as sign posting to a range of different tyeps of licences which you may wish to use to provide access to your project deliverables, as well as those that you might encounter that are offered by third parties (such as a range of open content licences). Watch this space as well for news about our brand new graphics which we are currently developing.
Naomi
