UK copyright and history book

[seixalbarreiro]

Good afternoon,

Apologies for the following, as it is yet again a regurgitation about the British Newspaper Archive (BNA) and the public domain.

I am currently in the process of writing up a history book with an EU-based publisher for commercial purposes.

I have used the content available from the BNA for several verbatim translations.

I recently got in touch with the BNA and was told I was allowed to use their content free of copyright as follows: “please be advised that unsigned newspaper text goes out of copyright 70 calendar years after the year of publication, and signed newspaper text goes out of copyright 70 calendar years after the death of the author(s)”.

1. Whilst it’s fair to assume that I am free to use 19th and early 20th century content, what about mid-century content? How am I supposed to work out when, say, a 1940s journalist died?

2. For any content effectively falling under the 70-year rule, is the so-called ‘fair use’ rule applicable to a commercial history book?

3. If not, how am I supposed to gain permission from the rightsholder?

4. Alternatively, is fully-referenced paraphrasing an option at all?

Thanks a lot.

[AndyJ]

Hi seixalbarreiro and welcome to the forum,

I'm assuming that all your newspaper sources taken from the BNA are editions which were published in the UK. If this is correct then it makes life simpler (comparatively speaking!). From this I assume that you require the extracts to be translated into another langauge for your book.

1. If after a reasonably diligent search you are unable to discover when a named author died, British copyright law allows you to make reasonable assumptions about when the person might have died based on his or her date of birth and normal average life expectancy. EU copyright law doesn't contain exactly the same provsions and only recognises a narrow list of exceptions - see Article 5 of the Information Society Directive (English version). If that test indicates that the person died more recently than 70 years ago, you would need to seek permission to use a substantial amount of text. The copyright owner will be the newspaper publisher or their successor.

2. The UK exceptions to copyright (see section 29-31 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988) allow for text to be quoted provided that this is fair dealing, and the source of the quotation is cited in your book. It doesn't matter if it is intended to include the quotation in a commercially published book or magazine etc. There is no statutory definition of 'fair dealing', such as a set percentage or number of words. The recognised approach taken by the UK courts is to ask the hypothetical question: would a reasonable person think that the amount being quoted was fair? Make sure that you quote no more than is essential for your purpose. If necessary you can split up a long passage into smaller pieces which contain the key information which is important for your point. Since you are likely to be publishing your book in the EU, it may be helpful to study sub paragraphs (a) to (f) of paragraph 3 to Article 5 of the InfoSys Directive noted above, since that document provides slightly different exceptions which may suit your purpose more accurately.

3. As mentioned above, where you tihink permission may be needed, you should try to identify the publisher of the newspaper, or more likely the present day owner of the rights to the original paper's intellectual property, such as the paper's name and its archives. If all of that fails, it might be worth contacting the Copyright Licensing Agency or the The Publishers Licensing Services to see if they can sell you a blanket licence which covers the material. Unfortunately the Newspaper Licensing Agency does not deal with newspaper content created before 1994.

4. You can certainly use paraphrasing and indeed I would recommend that approach if it meets your needs, since it removes the uncertainty about what does and does not constitute fair dealing. Obviously as you are writing about history you will wish to provide the best sources that you can find; if this means, for example, quoting an eye witness report from a journalist, then you should use that text verbatim under the quotation exception. Similarly if the newspaper quotes the speech of a politician or public figure, you should words his or her words verbatim, and again the exception will be available to justify this. The more the text moves away from factual reporting and veers towards opinion, the more you should try to use paraphrasing.

I hope this helps to answer your questions.