Copyright Lecture

Today we had a lecture on copyright laws, I believe this lecture was very important as it is something that we will all have to keep in mind when working. We were told a brief history of copyright and about Hogarths Act which was the first copyright law made in 1710. We were told that copyright comes into affect as soon as a person creates something that can be protected and it is fixed in some way such as on paper, film or sound recording, etc. It is also referred to as intellectual property and copyright is a separate property from the ownership of the physical artwork.

We were told that the author or artist is not the legal owner of the copyright when the work is produced as part of employment as then the copyright belongs to the company or employer who hired you. This also applies to work produced under contract to a third party such as freelancing work. Copyright protects original literary works, musical work, original artistic works etc. I was surprised to learn that you don't need to register copyright in this country as it is automatic and there is no need to fill out forms and it is free. However, we were told that we may need to provide proof that we were the first person to create the work. It was suggested that we deposit a copy of our work to a solicitor for safe keeping. As a collage artist an interesting part of this lecture was learning that artists using materials in their collages are still in danger of infringement if they reproduce a significant part of the material such as a recognisable print, which makes sense to me as the graphic designer who designed the print on the material owns the copyright. Overall this lecture was very interesting and informed me on important laws that I will need to keep in mind when making work.