Copyright News - Changes to Copyright Law

On 19 October a new Copyright Bill went before parliament. This is to implement changes to copyright law announced by the government in May 2006. These changes will come into effect on 1 January 2007.

The bill will:

Create new exceptions for copying for personal/private use
Create a new exception for copying for universities, disabilities services and libraries
Create a new exception for parody and satire
Create an exception for cached copies
Allow copying of broadcasts from the internet
Allow a performance in class to be communicated to a remote classroom and
Boost protection for Technological Protection Measures and increase penalties for circumventing these protections

It also includes increased penalties for copyright infringement and a number of minor amendments.

How will these changes affect you?

Copying for Personal Use

Making copies of programs on TV (‘time-shifting’) for personal use will no longer be an infringement. But conditions apply:

Only one copy of a program can be made
It can only be shared amongst a family or household
It must be deleted once it is watched and
The copy cannot be used in class.

Broadcast copies for teaching must still be processed through the Audio Visual Production Unit.

Changing a CD to an MP3 format or videos to DVDs (‘format-shifting’) for private use will no longer be an infringement. But conditions apply:

Only one copy can be made
It can only be for private and domestic use
It cannot be placed online
The original and the new copy cannot be hired or sold
The copy cannot be used in class.

New exception for universities, disabilities services, libraries and archives

Material can be copied or placed online under this exception if it is for non-commercial use and

The use is a special case
The use does not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work
The use does not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the copyright owner

This exception will not apply if there is an existing exception that can be used. For example, universities will continue to pay licence fees to make multiple copies for educational purposes under the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) licence.

This exception can be overridden by a contract or licence agreement.

This exception does not entitle a user to circumvent a technological protection measure to take advantage of the exception.

New exception for Parody and Satire

Material can be copied or placed online if it is a fair dealing with the material for the purposes of parody or satire. The use can be commercial.

Any copying under this exception must be ‘fair’. When determining what is fair, staff need to consider:

The purpose and character of the use
The nature of the material being copied
The possibility of obtaining the material within a reasonable time at an ordinary commercial price
The effect of the use on the potential market for and value of the material being copied
And where only part of the material is being used, how much of it is being copied.

This exception can be overridden by a contract or licence agreement.

This exception does not entitle a user to circumvent a technological protection measure to take advantage of this exception.

Cached copies

There will be an exception for universities allowing them to cache copies of material on their servers.

Copying broadcasts on the Internet

The Screenrights Licence will be expanded so that broadcasts made available on the internet will be included in the licence. This means the broadcasts can be duplicated and streamed for use in teaching.

Any material copied under the licence will need to be processed by the Audio Visual Production Unit.

Performances in Class

There is an existing exception that allows performances of copyright works in class. This will be expanded to permit the performances to be communicated to a remote classroom by video conferencing or other method.

Technological Protection Measures

Technological Protection Measures are technical locks like passwords, watermarks and codes that prevent access or copying of material in digital form.

It will become an offence to circumvent a technological protection measure, to provide circumvention services to another person or to supply a circumvention device to another person.

There are some exceptions which allow circumvention for educational purposes under the CAL licence, for libraries and archives, for interoperability with computer programs, for encryption research and for computer security testing. However these exceptions only apply to the act of circumvention itself. They do not allow staff to provide circumvention services to colleagues or to supply circumvention devices to staff at other institutions.