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Copyright blog
Recently we were asked about quotations in a PhD thesis which was about to be submitted for posting in Discovery, UCL’s open access repository. The student had included a small number of images from published papers by other authors (third party material).
Very sensibly the student had made an initial attempt to seek permission by contacting the publisher in each case but had received no response and was concerned about what to do next. Was permission essential to include these particular images? Again, a sensible question.
The IPKAT website (and various newspapers) have reported the latest (and final?) stage of the legal disputes surrounding the “Monkey selfie” case. In 2014 the photographer, David Slater started an action against Wikimedia for copyright infringement following online usage without permission of the photograph of a crested macaque. The macaque had “operated” the camera set-up by Mr Slater and taken an impressive selfie.
People sometimes ask about the copyright issues which might arise if one reproduces the cover of a book on social media. For example you might want to use a copy of the front cover to draw the attention of your particular academic community to a useful publication or you might just want to recommend a book to your friends. There is no doubt that the designs of recent book covers are protected by copyright and the usual rules apply.
A UCL researcher recently asked a series of questions about obtaining copyright permission to reproduce a published psychometric scale in the researcher’s own paper:
Q. Would the scale itself be protected by copyright?
A. Yes, if it is the original creation of the author(s) it will benefit from copyright protection, in which case permission is required to reuse it lawfully.
Q. What are the copyright implications of translating the scale into another language in order to apply it in a different cultural context?
A new (the European Alliance for Research Excellence) to the MEPs sitting on the EU Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee (JURI Committee) puts the case for a really effective and workable copyright exception for Text and Data Mining (TDM) in Europe.
The includes an interesting post about a copyright claim brought by a photographer against the well known model, Gigi Hadid. It is alleged that Ms Hadid circulated the photograph of herself to her millions of Instagram followers without seeking permission from the copyright owner (the photographer, Peter Cepeda). One interesting detail is that it is alleged a watermark carrying information on the ownership of the copyright was also removed from the photograph.