Copyright for lecturers

The starting rule is that first owner of copyright will be the author. 

However, there are a number of exceptions to this rule including works created during the course of employment.

In general, for material produced by an employee in the course of her/his work at Manchester Met, the copyright belongs to Manchester Met. 

For more details, please refer to the Manchester Met Intellectual Property Policy.

Copyright can also be bought, sold (assigned) or licensed to another person or organisation. Additionally, where the work has been commissioned from a third party (for example under a contract for services or other agreement) the contractor will often own the copyright. This may also be the case for academic articles as usually the publisher will own the copyright under a publishing agreement rather than the author or Manchester Met.

In some situations, where there is a joint contribution there may be joint ownership of works.

It’s up to you as the author to select the most suitable licence depending on how you wish your article to be reused – the elements to think about are whether you’d like to be attributed if someone quotes or re-uses your work (including text, tables or graphs), whether you’re happy for your work to be used for commercial purposes, and how the work may be re-shared going forward. There are six licences to choose from, plus a ‘no copyright’ at all dedication tool, they are all explained on the Creative Commons licences page. There’s a tool provided to help you decide which is best for you.  

Without permission from the rightsholder (publisher / author) such copying is not allowed because it breaches copyright and can get you and Manchester Metropolitan University into bother. Manchester Metropolitan University has a licence from the Copyright Licencing Agency (CLA) which permits a reasonable amount of copying - please use the Digitisation service, it’s really easy to make requests and they should be satisfied within 7 working days. 

If you need to make use of someone else’s copyright protected work there are some exceptions to copyright law for teaching which may help. These are subject to the ‘fair dealing’ test.  

Using fair dealing, you may be permitted to carry out copying without either seeking permission from the owner or copying under licence. For example, copying a chapter or article is covered by the Copyright Licensing Agency Licence and is managed for you by the Library’s Digitisation service so fair dealing doesn’t usually apply. If Manchester Met holds a licence, it’s safer to do the copying that way rather than by use of an exception, but sometimes a licence can’t help and we need to look to an exception instead.  

These legal exceptions for teaching allow you to copy works in any medium as long as the use is purely to illustrate a point. The copying should be for non-commercial purposes, and it is best practice to accompany the usage with an acknowledgement of the source (unless that’s really impractical for you).  

Last but not least, your use should be ‘fair dealing’ which basically means you should only use as much as you really need to. So minor uses, such as a few lines of text on an interactive whiteboard are okay, but uses which would undermine sales of teaching materials are not. You should avoid copying large amounts of material or whole books for example.  

The tests for fair dealing mean you need to think about whether your use of someone else’s work is fair. The amount is not defined by law so deciding on whether something is fair will always need to be done on a case-by-case basis. If you’re unsure about whether the amount you need to copy is fair, we’re here to help and you can contact us at [email protected] for guidance.  

This exception can be used when you want to use in-copyright works that aren’t covered by a licence held by the University. For example, the CLA licence doesn’t hold agreements with every country or publisher in the world, so this exception could be used for copying extracts of works that are excluded from coverage by their Licence. The amount that can be copied is not defined in law (as yet), yet it’s generally taken to be a chapter or 5% of a particular book or journal – however, this limit applies across the whole University (as in only one unit can copy further from the same title in the same year).  

The most relevant fair dealing exception for tutors is the ‘Illustration for instruction’ or ‘education’ exception which is to be found in Section 32 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. These are the most important features: 

• Your reuse must be fair dealing (in that it doesn’t damage the interests of the copyright owner). 

• The exception can apply to copyright-protected content in any medium, text, graphics, images, film etc. 

• It needs to be for a non-commercial purpose. It’s generally assumed that regular HE courses qualify as non-commercial. 

• It must be carried out by “… a person giving or receiving instruction” but it’s fine if other Manchester Met staff are involved in preparing the material. 

• There must be adequate acknowledgement of author and source. 

• The exception cannot be overridden by the terms of a contract. For example, if the terms of our contract with the publisher of an e-journal state that we cannot upload extracts into our VLE, that will not legally prevent us from doing so, provided it is “fair dealing” in the particular circumstances and therefore covered by the exception. 

• When relying upon the education exception, it helps our claim that what we are doing is fair dealing if we make the content available exclusively to Manchester Met staff and students in a secure environment such as our Reading Lists and/or Moodle. Ideally access should be limited to the students taking the relevant module. That supports our claim that it is for a non-commercial educational purpose. Limiting the audience may also reduce potential harm to the interests of the copyright owner. 

Audio visual content 

Under the terms of the education exception it may be fair dealing to use extracts from film or other media in teaching. It may also be fair dealing to reuse a complete film depending on the circumstances, contact [email protected] if you need further information on this.  

Films are protected works under UK copyright law which means that showing films at Manchester Met in the course of teaching may risk infringing copyright. The good news is that if the films are on BoB (Box of Broadcasts) or Kanopy, the usage is covered by a licence.  

There are also exceptions in copyright law (in particular s.32 of the CDPA 1988 as amended in 2014) that permit you to show a clips or a whole film for educational purposes (illustration for instruction) in the classroom. This usage is subject to the ‘fair dealing’ principle so your showing should be non-commercial in nature, only show as much as you need to get your point across (this can include a whole film) and you should accompany it with a sufficient acknowledgement (unless impossible for reasons of practicality or otherwise).  

However, if you want to show a film for any other purpose than an educational one, or to a public audience not entirely made up of students on a course, you’ll need to obtain a screening licence. Examples of this are showing a film for entertainment in the SU or playing a film in the background at an event.  

Here are some licensing options:  

FilmbankMedia 

MPLC (Motion Picture Licensing Company)  

BFI – for films from their catalogue 

Hollywood Classics 

If you’re in doubt or need further guidance, get in contact via [email protected]