Copyright

The law of copyright came to Britain in 1709, and became a crime in 1911.
It protects all substantial intellectual property including literary, musical, dramatic or artistic works, and enables journalism to exist as a business, as without it, there would be no profit. This idea that "journalism is the business of turning information into money" uses copyright in doing so, as although there is no copyright in news and information, the way in which it is written or expressed is protected under copyright law.
Journalist and Journalism Tutor, Chris Horrie, wrote an article on "How To Copyright Yourself" due to recent arguments of DNA and genetic engineering.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1494746.stm

Any work you do belongs to you until you sell the rights to it to another party. This may be in the form of wages or employment, as accepting wages for your work means you are giving up the rights to it.
This is the same with intellectual work, as the law sees no difference in work done by hand or by brain. Another way of protecting your work is to license it.

1) Once you have sold your work for a set sum e.g wages, if it is then sold on for more money, the creator does not recieve any other payment. For example, if a journalist writes an article, and gets paid £200, but the article is then published and earns the company £1000, the journalist has already recieved their payment.
2) You can negotiate a different type of contract in which you recieve some of the money if the article is resold. This may be instead of, or for less, wages. More likely you can be a freelance journalist and license your work to publications. This means you keep all rights to your work, and it is returned to you after a set period.

Several exclusive rights typically attach to the holder of a copyright:

-to produce copies or reproductions of the work and to sell those copies (mechanical rights; including, sometimes, electronic copies: distribution rights)
-to import or export the work[citation needed]
-to create derivative works (works that adapt the original work)
-to perform or display the work publicly (performance rights)
-to sell or assign these rights to others
-to transmit or display by radio or video (broadcasting rights)

There is a defence of "fair dealing" available to journalists regarding copyright of news in the public interest. You can lift a short quote from another source, providing the original author is attributed to it.

From the statute:
It is an offence to perform any of the following acts without the consent of the owner:
Copy the work.
Rent, lend or issue copies of the work to the public.
Perform, broadcast or show the work in public.
Adapt the work.
The author of a work, or a director of a film may also have certain moral rights:
The right to be identified as the author.
Right to object to derogatory treatment.

There are certain factors which affect fair dealing:
-the purpose and character of the use;
-the nature of the copyrighted work;
-the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
-the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work

You can use copyrighted materials only in the following ways: (from the statute)
* Private and research study purposes.
* Performance, copies or lending for educational purposes.
* Criticism and news reporting.
* Incidental inclusion.
* Copies and lending by librarians.
* Acts for the purposes of royal commissions, statutory enquiries, judicial proceedings and parliamentary purposes.
* Recording of broadcasts for the purposes of listening to or viewing at a more convenient time, this is known as "time shifting".
* Producing a back up copy for personal use of a computer program.
* Playing sound recording for a non profit making organisation, club or society.


Please note: These notes have been collaborated using other sources, including Chris Horries Lecture Notes and wikipedia. I have not copyrighted this work :-)