dave bogle

 23 apr 2001

The rationale behind copyright is to give creators of original material control over the work they have produced.  Work eligible to be copyrighted is usually the result of creative skill and/or significant labour, and if you wish to use it then in most cases you need the consent of the owner.   Computer programs, incidentally, are treated on the same basis as literary works.

In general, protection lasts for the lifetime of the creator and for 70 years thereafter, with the rights passing into the author's estate along with other assets.  So why can you not just download from the Web as many old paintings as you want?  The reason is that Internet images are not the paintings themselves;  the copyright resides not in the original paintings, but in the electronic representations of them, so the copyright holders might be the photographers or the organisations that employed them.

Legal protection is automatic, but it does no harm to claim ownership by putting the International Copyright Sign and the date on your work.  It also looks a bit classier!

Exceptions to copyright include limited use for private study, teaching, literary criticism, news reporting etc;  it should also be noted that making a single copy for the purposes of personal study is not an infringement of copyright. 

And finally, how to get permission?  Just ask, but be prepared for a No!

This page is mostly a resume of the guidelines in the official government site  Intellectual Property.