Hello. I’m a dietitian and I’m setting up my own online counselling business. I’m thinking of offering one-hour sessions with individual clients. During a session, I can communicate with a client or I can work on tasks by myself, such as by creating educational handouts. I want to be the copyright owner of handouts that I create. In my electronic medical record app, I can upload a handout to privately share it with a client.
If I don’t finish creating a handout during one session, a client may want me to share the draft document with them. If my in-text citations and reference list are incomplete, do you think that it would be okay for me to share the draft with them and call myself the copyright owner of the draft? If yes, do you think that I should include a disclaimer in the draft since the draft would contain information from other authors? What do you think that I should write in the disclaimer? In addition, do you think that I should ask the client to not share the draft with anyone?
I could finish creating the handout in future session(s) with the client.
Thank you!
Sharing draft educational material with clients
Re: Sharing draft educational material with clients
Hi Saturn,
You automatically own the copyright in anything original which you write. It is good pratice to put a simple copyright notice on anything you publish (even if it is only to one person) but this is not a legal requirement. This applies to your drafts as much as it does to the finished handout. Where you quote from other peole's work, you are relying on the exception to copyright called fair dealing which is contained in section 30 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. To qualify for this exception you need to credit the source of the quotation, although of course you would also be doing this for standard academic reasons anyway.
You don't need a discalimer but it would not hurt to include one. I Imagine there may be medical reasons why the diet that you advise for a client might not be suitable for another person, so this could also form part of the reason for the client not to share the handout.
Just as a bit of background on copyright law, copyright cannot protect facts, such as statistics or chemical formulae, or ideas, but it does protect the expression of ideas. To take a cooking example, the ingredients, quantities and cooking temperatures in a recipe would be seen as facts, but the write-up for the method would be the author's own expression and this part would usually be subject to copyright unless the method is so banal and obvious that it lacked any originality or expression of the author's creativity.
You automatically own the copyright in anything original which you write. It is good pratice to put a simple copyright notice on anything you publish (even if it is only to one person) but this is not a legal requirement. This applies to your drafts as much as it does to the finished handout. Where you quote from other peole's work, you are relying on the exception to copyright called fair dealing which is contained in section 30 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. To qualify for this exception you need to credit the source of the quotation, although of course you would also be doing this for standard academic reasons anyway.
You don't need a discalimer but it would not hurt to include one. I Imagine there may be medical reasons why the diet that you advise for a client might not be suitable for another person, so this could also form part of the reason for the client not to share the handout.
Just as a bit of background on copyright law, copyright cannot protect facts, such as statistics or chemical formulae, or ideas, but it does protect the expression of ideas. To take a cooking example, the ingredients, quantities and cooking temperatures in a recipe would be seen as facts, but the write-up for the method would be the author's own expression and this part would usually be subject to copyright unless the method is so banal and obvious that it lacked any originality or expression of the author's creativity.
Advice or comment provided here is not and does not purport to be legal advice as defined by s.12 of Legal Services Act 2007
Re: Sharing draft educational material with clients
Hello AndyJ. Thank you for your help.