Copyright is a mechanism to protect intellectual property and refers to the right to copy or use an intellectual piece of work someone has produced, such as a photo, video or audio recording. Copyright means that only the original creators of those products and anyone they give authorisation to are allowed to share and reproduce this work. Making something copyrighted, therefore is a way to protect your intellectual property against someone using it without your consent and gives you a legal mechanism to prosecute them. Copyright comes into existence as soon as a work is ‘created’ and recorded in writing ‘or otherwise’. It does not need any registration (unlike trademarks and patents) to achieve protection in law. It is important to recognise that copyright in user-generated content will always belong to the author - which could be you. User-generated content is content created using the user’s own creative effort e.g. uploading his/her photographs, expressing thoughts in a blog, and contributions and discussions within social media. Copyright includes protection for: books, articles, blogs, software, photographs, drawings, music, recordings, broadcasts and films.

Something that is protected by copyright does not necessarily have to be labeled with the familiar copyright symbol ©. Authors/owners of copyright works are the only authority able to grant use of their works (or parts of their works) across any media whilst the works remain in copyright (which can be for up to 70 years in some countries). Uploading or copying content without the copyright owners’ permission may be an infringement of copyright, which is a criminal offence in most countries. It is important that you do check terms and conditions on information sources where you have taken content. They may allow use of material without permission, but under certain licence terms (e.g. under a Creative Commons license). For copyrighted material, you must not upload any content (unless very small) that does not belong to you or for which you do not have permission. For example, you may be able to use up to 400 continuous words from a published book.

In this course, we use a copyright mechanism called “Creative Commons”. Creative Commons is a type of license that you can use when you want to give other people the right to share, use or build on work that you have created. There are different types of Creative Commons licenses that you can choose if you for example only want to allow non-commercial uses of a piece of work you have produced. For other people sharing your work, it also protects them from any concerns about copyright infringement as long as they share or use your work in the ways and under the conditions that are specified in your chosen creative commons license.

Here is a good video that explains the idea behind creative commons in a bit more detail: