Copyright geekery in this morning’s newspaper
Two items of copyright geekery in this morning’s Guardian. Firstly. Alice Gould gives the legal 101 on hijacking”user-generated content” for a traditional media setting (well done Media Guardian for removing that nasty subscription barrier, by the way). Her conclusion:
The law may appear antiquated in the fast-changing world of the internet, but in most cases citizen journalists have the same legal protection as any other journalists.And on the letters page Jonathan Mitchell QC suggests that the Guardian’s legal team are fostering “deeply undemocratic” ideas, after the publication of Winston Churchill’s famous “We shall fight them on the beaches” speech over the weekend:
When MPs make speeches in parliament, these are recorded in Hansard and the report is subject to parliamentary copyright (formerly crown copyright) under section 165 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Houses of Parliament might in theory restrict republication of the debates in Hansard; but for many years they have, in practice, allowed this quite freely… Even that formal permission would not be needed now, as parliamentary copyright lasts only 50 calendar years, so that the last remnants of copyright in this speech ended on December 31 1990.Read the entire letter here.
