Copyright Corner

Recent changes to the College’s CLA (Copyright Licensing Agency) licence now entitle staff to digitise text and other extracts from publications covered by this licence. New entitlements are detailed below. For a comprehensive guide to copyright visit the Library website at http://www.glasgowmet.ac.uk/library/guides.html

Digitisation: Text, artistic works, moving images and sound can easily be digitised, copied and distributed. However, unless you have permission to do so under cover of a licence or permission from the rights holder you will infringe copyright. Also, the College must actually own an auditable copy of the work being copied. This could be a library book with a catalogue record or a departmental resource listed in an inventory. It is not permissible to copy for College work from a personal copy of a book.
The College CLA licence permits digitisation and verbatim retyping of extracts from books, journals and magazines published in the UK and covered by the licence. The rule is that if it is on the page it may be copied and digitised. These copies may be used in presentation software (e.g. PowerPoint) and used in classroom situations. These may be stored on a College server but not indexed or archived in a manner permitting access to students not studying the particular course for which they were copied. If the course is not to be repeated, the College should delete these materials from the server/VLE but can keep a copy for possible future reintroduction.
Copies may be sold to students but the College may only charge for the cost of production and not seek a profit. In Further Education, copies may be emailed and faxed to students, staff and consultants employed by the College under this provision. This is currently not permitted in Higher Education. There is no limit on the number of email copies that may be sent. Copies may be sent to staff and distance learners based overseas but further copying in the recipient country must be performed under local copyright legislation.
Digital copies may not be edited, modified or manipulated but may be marked to add emphasis. The use of optical character recognition (OCR) software is not permitted. All digital copies must be identified with the details of author/artist, title, publisher and ISBN/ISSN at the foot of each page so that the source of any extracts taken from licensed material may be identified. One important thing to note is that it is not permissible to make digital copies of digital materials (i.e. ‘born digital resources’). ‘Stills’ (photographs), adverts or logos and trademarks may not be copied or digitised without permission from the rights holder or licensing agency (DACS).
It should be noted that the College NLA licence (Newspaper Licensing Agency), does not permit the digitisation of text from newspapers.