Electronic Resources in the Virtual Learning

The legislation
The major copyright and associated laws in the US, the UK and Australia
are briefly examined in this section.
In the US the 1976 Copyright Act remains in force and gives the owner
of copyright the exclusive right to do and to authorise others to do the
following:
■
to reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords;
■
to prepare derivative works based upon the work;
■
to distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale
or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
■
to perform the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic,
and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and
other audiovisual works;
■
to display the copyrighted work publicly, in the case of literary,
musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and
pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual
images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work;
■
and for sound recordings, to perform the work publicly by a digital
audio transmission.
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However, librarians in the US need to be aware of a number of other
laws relating to copyright. For example, in 1998, the US signed into law
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The legislation was
designed to implement two 1996 World Intellectual Property
Organisation (WIPO) treaties: the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the
WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty. It also addressed a number
of other significant copyright-related issues. Section 1201 is of most
relevance to librarians for it prohibits the ‘circumvention’ of any
effective ‘technological protection measure’ (e.g a password or form of
encryption) used by a copyright holder to restrict access to its material.
Another Act of relevance to US librarians, particularly those involved
with the provision of distance learning materials, is the Technology,
Education and Copyright Harmonisation Act (the TEACH Act) 2002.
This Act allows copyright protected materials to be used in distance
education, including on websites and by other digital means, without
permission from the copyright owner and without payment of royalties.
However, the law does expect educational institutions to undertake
numerous procedures to comply with the Act. The ALA have produced
an excellent overview of the meaning and importance of this Act on their
website.
2
In the UK, the legislation in force is the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act of 1988. The full text of the Act is available on the Web.
3
However,
since 1988, Statutory Instruments (SI) have been used to make many
amendments to the original Act. To ensure you are looking at the full
and up-to-date version of the law, you must also consult the SIs. The
1988 Act defines copyright as: 
… a property right which subsists … in the following descriptions of
work – 
(a) original literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works,
(b) sound recordings, films, broadcasts or cable programmes, and 
(c) the typographical arrangement of published editions.
Australian copyright law is governed by the 1968 Copyright Act,
although the legislation has been amended many times since this date. In
2000, two significant amendments to the law were enacted including the
recognition of moral rights – the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights)
Act and the Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Act. The full text is
available on the Web with all the amendments included.
4
The
significance of these changes is discussed later in the chapter.
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Duration of copyright protection
Copyright is not protected indefinitely in most countries of the world
and will expire after a set period of time. Duration of copyright is an
area where the law differs between countries, for example between the
UK, US and Australia (see Table 4.1). In the UK (and the US) copyright
protection for literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work is provided:
■
to the author of the work, the person who created it during their
lifetime;
■
to their executors for 70 years after the author’s death;
■
for the typographical arrangement of a published edition for 25 years
from the date of publication.
In the US, the duration of copyright was extended from 50 to 70 years
in 1978; however, this did not offer the same length of protection for
works published before this date. This led to the Sonny Bono Copyright
Term Extension Act of 1998, which extended the copyright of works
first published before 1978. Meanwhile in Australia, copyright in literary
works is protected for the life of an author and then for 50 years after
their death.
The duration of copyright law can vary depending on the format of the
material. For example, UK law offers protection for films for 70 years
after the last to die of:
■
the principal director;
■
the author of the screenplay;
■
the author of the dialogue;
■
the composer of the music created for and used in the film.
Also in the UK, sound recordings, broadcasts, cable programmes and
computer-generated works have copyright protection for 50 years after
the end of the year in which they were first made, released or first
broadcast or included in a cable programme service. If copyright has
expired works can be freely copied, but it is wise to check the law in your
country and to check for variations between the different formats.
The permitted acts and fair dealing
Copyright laws throughout the world are not all-pervasive and make
provision for some level of copying under specific terms and conditions.
UK law and the laws of many Commonwealth countries, such as
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Australia and Canada, have a concept known as ‘fair dealing’ which sets
out a number of permitted acts that are defences in a court of law, not
rights. In the US law there is a similar concept known as Fair Use, which
is generally far more flexible.
In the UK the law states that in order to infringe copyright, you must
copy a ‘substantial’ part of a work, therefore copying an insubstantial