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Copyright
The issue of copyright relating to Web- and Internet-based materials is still something of a grey area, largely because copyright law has not yet caught up with the new medium. Indeed, it will be impossible to give clear and unambiguous guidelines in this area until test cases have been fought. That said, the most important consideration in the short term is surely how to avoid becoming embroiled in just such a case. The safest approach is to view Web-based materials just like materials published in any other medium, which are of course subject to fairly stringent regulations concerning copying (ask your librarian for details). Certainly, the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) takes this line, firmly. You can have a look at their guidelines at http://www.cla.co.uk./www/internet.htm. For the CLA, copyright begins when you start browsing Web pages, loading them into your computer’s RAM, saving them automatically in your Web browser’s cache and probably (in these days of chargeable Internet downloads from the States) on your institution’s proxy server. This area is as yet ill-defined, although it is highly unlikely that you would fall foul of the law for browsing pages that are made freely available for all. If you wish to print out a page of part of one, however, the CLA advises you to email the webmaster of the site to ask for permission — this is certainly the safest course of action, and may bring you some useful contacts. Most Web authors are only too pleased to grant permission, and should reply quickly. If you receive no reply, however, you are not automatically covered. Do also check and see if the site has some copyright statement buried within it; you may be able to print out pages without asking first. Whatever happens, you should include the proper acknowledgement (usually in the form of the page’s URL, or Web address) on each sheet of hard copy.Linking to someone else’s pages is also not entirely straightforward (legally, that is). Again, the CLA advises you to ask before you link, and to link where possible to the homepage to avoid misrepresenting the content of the remote site. Cyberspace has a tendency of making huge geographical hops appear seamless, so you should not give your visitors the impression that the pages you link to are part of your own site. This consideration applies especially to linking to images. The CLA’s advice is sensible (although subject to the inevitable legal disclaimer) and should keep you out of trouble. It is obviously wise (as well as being good ‘netiquette’) to refrain from lifting chunks of someone else’s web pages and passing them off as your own. Printouts from foreign web sites, as long as they are done on an ad hoc basis and reproduce the URL of the site, on the other hand, are unlikely to bring disaster, especially if you email the webmaster first. As far as linking is concerned, it is always wise the ask the webmaster for permission to link, partly as a courtesy and partly in order to warn him/her of any substantial increase in traffic once your students start following the link (some Web sites, or so the Web folklore goes, are still hosted on Mac Classics connected to the Internet by a ‘phone line). Of course, legislation in other countries is likely to be different to that in force in Britain, but the CLA has reciprocal agreements with a number of other Reproduction Rights Organisations, including those in France, Germany and Spain (see http://www.cla.co.uk./www/rro.htm for details), so following their guidelines looks like the safest course of action.If you are thinking of making printed materials available on your Web site, you should look at another set of CLA guidelines at http://www.cla.co.uk./www/electro.htm. In particular, you should note that any photocopying licence your institutional library may have does not cover the electronic reproduction of copyright materials, unless you have obtained the permission of the copyright holder. This includes books you have written yourself, unless you have explicitly retained copyright. The notion of ‘fair dealing’ (as preserved in the Copyright Act of 1988), according to which an individual may make a single copy of certain types of material for private study, typically amounting to a chapter or 5% of a book and one article from a journal, is unlikely to cover electronic storage or reproduction.Finally, if you are concerned about others accessing and copying your own work, you may wish to restrict access to your own on-line materials to your own students or to people from within your own institution. It is quite easy to have pages password-protected or to restrict access to computers physically present on your campus. Adding the copyright symbol itself to your pages is also straightforward: it is <©> Links: The JISC has published a Senior Management Briefing Paper on electronic copyright at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub98/sm05_copyright.html.Visit http://www.greyday.org/main.html in order to prepare for the second annual Internet Grey Day (scheduled for October 1st 1999), when the Web (or some of it, at least) will turn grey in protest at copyright infringements.DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer. The above represents my beliefs about Internet copyright issues, but may contain unintentional inaccuracies for which I cannot be held responsible. It does not necessarily represent the opinion of my employer or of other members of the WELL consortium, nor of those members of the WELL email discussion list who generously communicated their views on this issue to me. You may, however, copy and disseminate the material contained on this page in any way you think fit. Last updated
22nd November 1998
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