Intellectual Property

Intellectual property covers copyright, patents, designs & trademarks and is intended to protect the rights of individuals who invent, write or otherwise create original material to control and profit from their creations.

All members of the academic community, both staff and students, should be familiar with the conditions under which they can make use of intellectual property and have a personal obligation, in law, to ensure that they comply with them.

The majority of the information on these pages is concerned with copyright issues, but links are provided to sources of information on patents, designs and trademarks.

Any copying, by mechanical/electrical means, for example, using photocopiers, scanners, or downloading & saving from the Internet, is covered by copyright. In particular it should be remembered that the availability of material on the internet carries no implicit license to copy, such material has the same levels of protection as if it were printed.

Therefore is important that members of staff wishing to incorporate third party material into e-learning systems such as WebCT and the University of Worcester Content Repository take intellectual property issues into account early in the planning process in order to avoid the potential pitfalls.

If you are in any doubt about whether it is permissible to copy something or to use it in an e-learning system please ask either your Liaison Librarian or Roger Fairman on ex.5336 / e-mail r.fairman@worc.ac.uk.

Please Note:

The information on these pages is intended help staff and students at UW ensure that their use of intellectual property is legitimate and every effort is made to ensure that it is accurate.

However it is not, and should not be regarded as, legal advice or opinion.

Moral Rights

The guidance on this site is primarily concerned with the process of 'making copies', however there are also a set of so called Moral Rights which are set out in the CPDA88. These are:

The right to be identified as the Author of a work. - this right has to be explicitly asserted by the author to take affect, and is the reason for the statements, like the one below, found on the title pages of books. This right lasts for the same duration as copyright, but remains with the first author irrespective of any subsequent assignment of rights.

The Author asserts her moral rights to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The right to object to derogatory treatment of a work. This right lasts for the same duration as copyright, but remains with the first author irrespective of any subsequent assignment of rights.

The right not to suffer false attribution of a work. In effect the inverse of the first right. This right lasts for 20 years from the end of the year of death.

The 'right of privacy'. The commissioner of a photographic work has the right to prevent commissioned photographs being made public. This right lasts for the same duration as copyright, but remains with the commissioner irrespective of any subsequent assignment of rights.