What is Copyright?
Copyright is a right which allows the owner to prevent others from carrying out certain acts in relation to certain classes of creative work.
What is Copyright Insurance?
Intellectual Property Insurance from Charles Milnes and Company includes Copyright Insurance and enables companies to defend themselves against claims they have infringed competitor's copyrights, and to challenge competitors who infringe their own copyrights.
Copyright Protected Works
The types of works that copyright protects are:
- Original Literary work e.g. books, song lyrics, letters and computer programs
- Original Dramatic work e.g. dance, mime and television screenplays
- Original Musical work e.g. a work consisting of music, but excluding any works or action intended to be sung, spoken or performed with the music
- Original Artistic work e.g. paintings, photographs, works of architecture, drawings, charts, plans, sculptures and collages
- Typographical arrangements of published editions i.e. the typesetting and layout of a published work
- Sound recordings which may be recordings on any medium, e.g. tape or compact disc, and may be recordings of other copyright works, e.g. musical or literary
- Broadcasts
- Films which can be recorded from any medium which a moving image may be produced i.e. CD-Roms and video recordings
Once it is identified which of the categories the work fall under and provided the author of the work used his own skill and effort to create the work then copyright protection exists automatically. There is no formal registration process in the UK.
It should also be noted that Copyright does not protect the idea itself but the expression of the idea i.e. if an author has an idea for a book, the idea is not protected and protection only arises once the author puts the idea into concrete form.
Copyright Duration
| Work | Copyright Duration |
| Literary, dramatic, musical and artistic | 70 years from the end of the calendar year in which the author dies |
| Sound recording | 50 years from the end of the calendar year of release (50 years from making if not released within the above period) |
| Film | 70 years from the end of the calendar year of death of last to die of: director, screenplay author, dialogue author, composer of the music of the film |
| Broadcast | 50 years from the end of the calendar year in which the broadcast is made |
| Cable programme | 50 years from the end of the calendar year in which the programme is included in a cable programme services |
| Typography | 25 years from the end of the calendar year in which the edition is first published |
Rights Granted under Copyright
The owner of copyright in a work has the right to prevent another person from carrying out a range of restricted acts in relation to that work.
The most basic of these rights is the right to prevent others from copying the work.
