Who Owns My Work?
Part of the point of Planet SciCast is to introduce participants to the idea of “Intellectual Property”. In other words, if you create something, who gets to own it?
If you have a page on MySpace, or put photos on Flickr, You created that material, but you’ve clicked something to get it up there, did you read it? Who owns that material?? Do you, or does the company behind the website? What about YouTube? Well, you do the work, and YouTube make the money (via advertising on your films page), how do you feel about that? We think it’s important to at least consider these issues in the 21st Century, age of ‘user generated content’.
Uk Copyright law states that: “The author of a work is the first owner of any copyright in it”.
Author is defined as this: “in the case of [….] a film, the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the making of the [….] film are undertaken.”
(Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988)
In the case of Planet SciCast, that is the team or individual who makes the film, in other words, YOU! In order to stay within copyright law, Planet SciCast has to make sure YOU are the owner of your film, but WE still need to have the right to use it, or we couldn’t put it up on the Planet SciCast site. So…..
Creative Commons Licenses
….We think that the Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA is the best solution for SciCast films. Here’s what those letters mean:
BY – if anyone uses your film (which they can) they have to attribute it to you, your team, as the ‘original author’, always gets credit.
NC – Non Commercial – in other words you won’t make any money out of your film, so why should anyone else?
SA – Share Alike – Anyone who’d like to use your film for non commercial purposes can, and they can amend your film (for example, scicast will put a scicast end board onto your film, which means we have amended it, so it is a ‘derived work’ but we can only then use it using the same license as you.
For more information on Creative Commons licensing, look at the CC website:
Competition Entries License Downloads
If you are sending us a film for the competition you’ll need to download the right license, choose the one for your location, and each person in your team needs to print and sign a license to send with the film. (Don’t forget to keep a copy for yourself.)
When the entry form is available on the 18th of May you will be able to download the appropriate Creative Commons License from this page. Please do not send your films till then.
Other Intellectual Property issues that may be of interest:
Since you retain ownership of your film, you can choose to upload it to YouTube (for example) if you like. The CC license means that Planet SciCast cannot, do that because YouTube is a commercial site. We’ll need to ask you for permission if we wanted to do that.
You can do whatever you like with your film, without having to ask Planet SciCast
Because you have copyright on your film, no-one else can edit it or change it to make you look bad
If you find music and other sites where content is there under a Creative Commons License, you know you are free to share it.
We have a separate page about using music without breaching copyright, do have a look if you haven’t already.