Copyright Aid

Hi Kazzalisa and welcome to the forum, It seems to be the policy of these claims companies to go after small businesses because, I suppose, they are seen as more likely to just pay up to avoid the hassle, then write off the payment against tax. However the figure of £450 is not the loss which PA ...

Hi manny and welcome, Yes you are right, if the badge had been registered as a design when it first came out then that protection has now lapsed. However as design right is intended to propect the appearance, shape and contours of an item provided these elements are original and novel, I don't think ...

Sally, I didn't mention this in my earlier reply in order to keep it short and simple, but If one of the terms of the licence to use these patterns is not clear to you when you first buy it, and it is not one you might expect to exist in the circumstances, then you may also be protected by the ...

Hi Sally, good to hear from as ever. It's difficult to be specific but I think it's likely that the artist will own the copyright in the designs and the sewing pattern in most cases. It then becomes a matter of how much of that original ends up in your version of the completed item. As a rule of ...

Hi James, It is not quite correct to say that "Tintin is now in public domain" in America. What is in the public domain there are the original cartoon strips which were published in the USA in 1929. That is the only place where they are in the public domain. In the European Union and the UK (and ...

It will come as no surprise to regular visitors to these forums to hear that I don't agree with Jason on some of his points. Admin costs . It rather depends on whose costs we are talking about. If it is accepted that hiring a company to trawl the internet looking for instances of infringement is a ...

Hi Terry and welcome to the forum. It is possible that the AI tool has been trained using the original image which is the basis of the complaint. However provided that your prompts did not specify or reference that specific image then I don't think you have anything to worry about. In this context ...

There are two separate issues here. The music of a composer who died more than seventy years ago will now be in the public domain. This includes the notation of the music as it is this phyisical embodiment of the music which creates the copyright. A melody which has never been recorded in any manner ...

Hi Frances and welcome to the forums, Yes scanning or photographing a piece of sheet music onto a tablet would infringe copyright as the exception for private format shifting that was introduced in 2014 has been rescinded. However if you have bought a copy of the sheet music in question it might be ...

Hi Ophelie and welcome to the forum. There shouldn't be any copyright issues with your idea. Although you are deliberately selecting the books based on the colour of their covers, including them in a photograph would count as incidental inclusion since you would not be featuring any part of the work ...

Hi badge and welcome to the forum, I think we can both agree that £1000 is a disproportionate amount and it would not be accepted by a court as the true value of the licence fee which the copyright owner has lost out on. From your description, it it sounds as if the image was being used editorially, ...

Hi North of Here and welcome to the forum, Assuming these are names of real places then they are facts which were not created by the song writer and so cannot be subject to copyright. On that basis you would not be infringing anything by displaying the locations on a map, provided that you didn't ...

Hi bethany and welcome to the forum. If you are talking about offical posters published by the UK or US Governments, they are no longer subject to copyright. In the case of the UK, all works produced by or for the government were subject to Crown copyright . Crown copyright usually lasts for 125 ...

Hi tackler, It's only confusing because of the way the two rights have been brought into law ( 1 ). Copyright in a database . This is defined in Section 3A of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 as (2) For the purposes of this Part a literary work consisting of a database is original if, and ...

Hi greenman and welcome to the forum, Yes I think you have handled this correctly. The whole operation relies on PicRights making money from these claims hence the inflated and illogical amount being demanded. As you are probably aware having read some of the other threads here, if Alamy wanted to ...