Advice on copyright

Publishing your work on the web

If you decide to publish your own work on the internet, whether it be music tracks on Myspace or photos on Flickr, you may want to consider adding some copyright restrictions, to determine what other people can do with it. It won't necessarily stop other people from copying or re-using your work, but it may mean that you can do something about it if you need to.

An easy way to do this is to add a Creative Commons copyright licence to your work. This means that you can set up permissions in advance, like stating that anyone who uses your work has to acknowledge it as yours. Setting up this licence is fairly straightforward, and you can find more information about it on the Creative Commons website.

You can also register your work for copyright protection in the usual way. There are a number of copyright registers on the internet, although you may want to consider whether and how much you want to pay. For more advice see the guidelines from Copyright Aid.

Using other people's work

Of course the same rules apply in reverse. If you are using part or all of somebody else's work, whether it's a piece of text, a photo, video, music or anything else, you should be aware of the copyright restrictions. A good general rule is to assume that if you don't have express permission to use it, then you shouldn't.

Here again Creative Commons can help, as a number of websites, including Flickr and the advanced search in Google, will allow you to filter your search to show results with Creative Commons licences. This means you can search for an image, for example, and then check the CC licence to see if you can use it.

If you find a resource, on the web or anywhere else, and you're not sure if you can use it, then it's always best to check. If you can't contact the owner of the material, ask your tutor, Academic Librarian, or a member of the Learning Technology team for advice.