Copyright Clarifications

When copyright is licensed, use of the copyright material is limited to that contemplated by the parties at the time the licence is created.

This decision of the Court of Appeal has implications for many users of licensed material. The case arose when a freelance photographer took exception to photographs he had taken being held in a national newspaper’s photo archive. He had supplied the photographs when he carried out an assignment for the newspaper group, but claimed that use of the pictures should be limited even though the newspaper owned copyright of the original compilation of material which included the photographs.

In another case, users of media monitoring services were ruled to have infringed the copyright of publishers when they received material from the services but did not have an end-user licence. The monitoring services themselves had the relevant licences, but their customers did not.

The case also clarified the point that both headlines and short text extracts were also copyright.