How to legally use someone else's work? Copyright on the Internet.

How does Copyright work?

Copyright, as the name suggests, protects the author of some content. However, it is not just any content, it must meet certain conditions. As we read in the Copyright and Related Rights Act, a work is:

“Any manifestation of creative activity of an individual character, established in any form, regardless of its value, purpose and method of production.”

The most important condition for recognizing someone's work as a work will be "creative activity of an individual nature". We can check it through the so-called Statistical Disposability Test. To perform it, we must consider whether a given work is so simple and schematic that it could also have been created by another person. If we decide that it is - this work is not subject to copyright protection.

The author has two types of rights: personal and property. Personal rights are inalienable and always belong to the creator. These include: the right to authorship and to mark the work with one's name, the right to decide on the first release of the work to the public, the right to the integrity of the work and to exercise supervision over it.

Property rights are of course related to financial issues and deriving benefits from the work, its use, sharing, reproduction or modification. These rights can be disposed of, sold or licensed. They are also limited in time - they last from the day the work is made available to 70 years after the author's death.

Normally, if we want to use someone else's work, we should contact them, sign a transfer of rights agreement or a license agreement, and pay a fee. However, there are a few situations in which this course of action will not be necessary.

Public domain

I'm sure you've come across this term before. The public domain is a collection of works that are either no longer covered by copyright (70 years have passed since the author's death) or have never been covered by copyright (they were created before copyright was formulated, e.g. Jan Kochanowski's Fraszki, or Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa).

The public domain also includes content that is not protected by copyright in principle, including ideas, concepts, mathematical formulas, and texts of laws and other government documents.

We can use such works without any restrictions, but remember to credit the author, otherwise we may be accused of plagiarism!

Permitted private use

The copyright monopoly is also limited by fair private use. This term means that we can use previously distributed copyrighted works for our own needs, as well as share them with our friends and family. We can listen to music, download movies from the Internet, photocopy books, or lend CDs to a neighbor.

Sounds great? Unfortunately, there are some limitations. Fair use can only be used for personal use, for your own and your loved ones' private life. For example, we cannot sell copies, lend copies for a fee, or make them available to a wider audience, e.g. on the Internet.

The question often arises – can we place a piece of work on our blog or Facebook fanpage? Basically no – it goes beyond fair use, mainly because we share this content with an unlimited number of people. If it is our company blog/Facebook and we offer products or services on it, or it is enough that advertisements appear on our website for which we receive remuneration, we may be accused of deriving financial benefits from a given piece of work.

However, under certain circumstances we may exercise the right to quote.

The right to quote

This is probably the solution we use most often when it comes to exclusions from copyright property law. Within the work we create, we are allowed to quote fragments or small works that have already been disseminated.

Our use of someone else's work must be justified by such goals as: explanation, polemic, critical analysis, teaching. We can safely use a fragment that will help in better understanding the text or film we created.

The most important thing is that the quote is clearly marked (usually using quotation marks) and contains information about the author and the source.

Important – the right to quote does not only apply to text! You can also quote photographs, images or fragments of films.

Public use permitted

The Act also distinguishes several situations in which works can be used and distributed to an unlimited number of people. These rules are quite complicated, and include special exemptions for public institutions and activities for people with disabilities.

For us, only one provision will be important – the right to reprint.

The right to reprint applies primarily to the press, radio and television, and allows for further sharing of materials published in these channels. Some articles and photos can be published without the consent of the creator and free of charge, some require payment of remuneration (you can check the detailed guidelines in art. 25 of the act), but extracts from articles, photographs on current topics, as well as fragments of public speeches and statements can always be published free of charge.

These are all the exemptions that the Copyright and Related Rights Act offers us, but this is not the end of our possibilities when it comes to free use of intellectual property. We will discuss the topic of free licenses and works shared on the basis of Creative Commons next time.