Copyright is legal device that gives the owner the right to control how a creative work is used. Until several years ago the contents of a database could not be legally protected. Producers of databases that contained factual data could not claim copyright protection which made it impossible for them to prevent others from copying content. On 11 March 1996 the Council of the European Union adopted Directive 96/9/EG giving specific and separate legal rights (and limitations) to databases: database rights.

What is a Database?

A database is defined in the directive as “a collection of independent works, data or other materials which are arranged in a systematic or methodical way and are individually accessible by electronic or other means.” This broad definition could cover anything from mailing lists, repositories, directories and catalogues to telephone directories and encyclopaedias.

A database will be protected by database rights but its individual components (which may be factual data) may not.

What are Database Rights?

There may have been considerable effort in the creation of a database. This effort is known in intellectual property law as the “sweat of the brow (named after the idiom sweat of one’s brow). Database rights specifically protect this effort and investment. Investment includes “any investment, whether of financial, human or technical resources” and substantial means “substantial in terms of quantity or quality or a combination of both”. Metadata will be included in this investment. Infringement of a database right happens if a person extracts or re-utilises all or a substantial part of the contents of a protected database without the consent of the owner. Fair use and use for academic purposes apply to public databases.

Database rights last for fifteen years from the end of the year that the database was made available to the public, or from the end of the year of completion for private databases. Any substantial changes will lead to a new term of database rights.

The biggest database rights case to date was over William Hill Bookmaker’s reuse of the British Horseracing Board’s online database. In 2004 the European Court of Justice ruled that database rights were not infringed.

Other Protection

Databases are treated as a class of literary works and may also be given copyright protection for the selection and/or arrangement of the contents under the terms of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. For this to happen the selection and/or arrangement of the contents of the database must be original and require the intellectual creativity of the author. Arrangement of a list of names in alphabetical order would not meet this standard.

If a database, table or compilation does attract copyright protection, this lasts for a period of 70 years from the end of the calendar year in which the author dies. Databases not in the public domain may also be protected under the law of confidence. The Data Protection Act 1998 will also apply to databases containing personal data.

Creating Databases

Those involved in the creation of databases should give consideration to:

• Whether a database qualifies for copyright/database right protection?
• Who is the owner of the database is (i.e. the institution or other)?
• What contracts apply to the creation of the database.
• Offering text/licences that specify how the data may be used.
• Keeping a record of the investment in a database.

Creators should also update databases regularly to ensure that the 15 year protection period recommences.

Further Information

Briefing documents on Introduction To Intellectual Property and Copyright [1] and An Introduction To Creative Commons [2] are also available.

References

1. Introduction To Intellectual Property and Copyright, Cultural Heritage briefing document no. 38, UKOLN, <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cultural-heritage/documents/briefing-38/>
2. An Introduction to Creative Commons, Cultural Heritage briefing document no. 34, UKOLN, <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cultural-heritage/documents/briefing-34/>

Copyright is a type of intellectual property that protects artistic works such as literature, music, art and recordings. It provides protection for creators as well as publishers. It is also important for publishers, such as museums, to protect themselves against breaches of copyright.

Copyright varies country by country although there is increasing harmonisation within the EU, and international treaties cover many countries.

There is no need to register copyright.

Some key facts relating to UK law:

• In a literary, musical or artistic work (including a photograph), copyright lasts until 70 years after the death of the creator.
• In sound recordings and broadcasts copyright usually belongs to the producer, broadcaster or publisher.
• Sound recordings are generally protected for 50 years from the year of publication. Broadcasts are protected for 50 years.

These guidelines are an interpretation of UK law. Please take appropriate legal advice before making any significant decisions regarding copyright of resources used in your service or project.

Establishing Copyright

It is important to establish copyright from the outset of your project as this may take a significant amount of time, and influence the viability of the project. If copyright cannot be traced then suitable records should be kept of attempts to establish copyright. You may then choose to publish uncleared material ‘at risk’. Legal advice should be sought if you are in any doubt.

Permission

For material in copyright, you should seek permission from the creator or copyright holder. This will relate to particular uses, for instance in a guidebook or on the museum’s web site.

There are some exceptions to the copyright owner’s rights. For example, you may be allowed limited copying of a work for non-commercial research and private study, criticism or review, reporting current events, and teaching in schools. The copyright holder should still be acknowledged and there are limits in terms of the number of copies and for large amounts of material.

Safeguarding Copyright

Since placing material on the web makes it easier for people to easily reuse it, you should consider ways of safeguarding your copyright.

Common ways are to make users register to use material, publish only low-resolution images, and imbed digital watermarks.

You may judge that while these approaches might help protect misuse they will also limit what might be considered to be unharmful usage. Low-resolution images may still be good enough for many uses, but are not generally good enough for paper-based publications. Digital watermarks can be removed by expert users.

Certainly, restricting some services to registered users may be appropriate for a comprehensive high-profile service such as SCRAN, the Scottish online learning resource, but for a smaller site this approach could be off-putting for the majority of users and still not prevent misuse.

You may chose to licence your digital assets through a Creative Commons licence which provides a more open approach to rights.

Acknowledgements

This document has been produced from information contained within the Renaissance East Midlands Simple Guide to Digitisation that was researched and written by Julian Tomlin and is available from http://www.renaissanceeastmidlands.org.uk/. We are grateful for permission to republish this document under a Creative Commons licence. Anyone wishing to republish this document should include acknowledgements to Renaissance East Midlands and Julian Tomlin.



Creative Commons (CC) [1] refers to a movement started in 2001 by US lawyer Lawrence Lessig that aims to expand the collection of creative work available for others to build upon and share. The Creative Commons model makes a distinction between the big C (Copyright) meaning All Rights Reserved and CC meaning Some Rights Reserved. It does so by offering copyright holders licences to assign to their work, which will clarify the conditions of use and avoid many of the problems current copyright laws pose when attempting to share information.

What Licences?

There are a series of eleven Creative Commons licences available to download from the Web site. They enable copyright holders to allow display, public performance, reproduction and distribution of their work while assigning specific restrictions. The six main licences combine the four following conditions:

	Attribution – Users of your work must credit you.
	Non-commercial – Users of your work can make no financial gain from it.
	Non-derivative – Only verbatim copies of your work can be used.
	Share-alike – Subsequent works have to be made available under the same licence as the original.

The other licences available are the Sampling licence, the Public Domain Dedication, Founders Copyright, the Music Sharing licence and the CC Zero licence. Creative Commons also recommends two open source software licences for those licensing software: the GNU General Public licence and the GNU Lesser Public licence.

Each license is expressed in three ways: (1) legal code, (2) a commons deed explaining what it means in lay person’s terms and (3) a machine-readable description in the form of RDF/XML (Resource Description Framework/Extensible Mark up Language) metadata. Copyright holders can embed the metadata in HTML pages.

International Creative Commons

The Creative Commons licences were originally written using an American legal model but through the Creative Common international (CCi) have since been adapted for use in a number of different jurisdictions. As of April 2009 52 jurisdictions have completed licences and 7 jurisdictions licences are being developed.

The regional complexities of UK law has meant that two different set of licences have had to be drafted for use of the licenses the UK. Creative Commons worked with the Arts and Humanities Research Board Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law at Edinburgh University on the Scotland jurisdiction-specific licenses completed December 2005 (version 2.5) and the Information Systems and Innovation Group (ISIG) to create the England and Wales jurisdiction-specific licenses completed April 2005 (version 2.0).

Why Use Creative Commons Licences?

There are many benefits to be had in clarifying the rights status of a work. When dealing with Creative Commons licenced work, it is known if the work can be used without having to contact the author, thus allowing the work to be exploited more effectively, more quickly and more widely, whilst also increasing the impact of the work. Also in the past clarification of IPR has taken a huge amount of time and effort, Creative Commons could save some projects a considerable amount of money and aid their preservation strategies. More recently, because Creative Commons offers its licence in a machine-readable format, search engines can now search only CC licenced resources allowing users easier access to ‘free materials’.

Issues

Although Creative Commons has now been in existence for a while there are still issues to be resolved. For example in the UK academic world the question of who currently holds copyright is a complex one with little commonality across institutions. A study looking at the applicability of Creative Commons licences to public sector organisations in the UK has been carried out [2].

Another key area for consideration is the tension between allowing resources to be freely available and the need for income generation. Although use of a Creative Commons license is principally about allowing resources to be used by all, this does not mean that there has to be no commercial use. One option is dual licensing, which is fairly common in the open source software environment.

References

1. Creative Commons,
   <http://creativecommons.org/>
2. Creative Commons Licensing Solutions for the Common Information Environment, Intrallect,
   <http://www.intrallect.com/cie-study/>