2.2: Copyright: Ownership and Authorship

The second objective of this part is to give you an understanding of the law of copyright and how it applies to your practice.

Be warned! This section is quite ‘text heavy’ in that we do ask you to read quite a lot about copyright. This however is really important so that you can understand how copyright applies to your practice. It is, after all, the basis of the way in which you will be able to licence your work to other people.

At the end of this section the objective is that you will be able to identify what you author and what you own in your dance works for the purposes of copyright law.

Introduction to copyright

As a broad introduction to the subject, Copyright User has been written by practitioners and academics.

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The website states that it is:

“an online resource aimed at making UK copyright law accessible to creators, media professionals, entrepreneurs, students, and members of the public. The resources here are meant for everyone who uses copyright: musicians, filmmakers, performers, writers, visual artists and interactive developers, among others. Our goal is to inform creators about how to protect their work, how to license and exploit it, and how to legally re-use the work of others.”

We will be revisiting Copyright User later in this block, but for now make a note of some of the questions that spring to your mind about your work when you browse around the site.

If you need a reminder of what copyright is all about, have a look at the Introduction to Copyright in Section 1.3 and as found below:

Then go on to read the information on copyright below. This is in three sections, and each written part is followed by a section taken from our film

The sections are:

  • the different types of work protected by copyright
  • ideas expression fixation and originality
  • copyright ownership and authorship

Task Introduction

In the following sections, watch the film clip and then respond to the series of questions that are designed to get you to look at the film through a copyright lens. Before you do this however, consider the following resource:

Task (I)

After you have watched the film, identify the different types of copyright that exist in the work.

Would a dance recorded using the labanotation system be a literary work? How may a dance work be defined within the parameters of a dramatic work for copyright purposes? Can you define music?

Explain what it means to say that a product may have more than one copyright, and give some examples.

If you have a digital recording of a contemporary dance which is accompanied by music and by pictures on the stage, can you name the various copyrights that would subsist in the recorded work?

How should a ballet, which contains a musical element but is intended for stage performance or to be made as a film, be characterised for the purposes of copyright?

If the author of copyright in a dance died in August 1950, when will copyright in the dance expire?

Task (II)

When thinking of a dance, can you distinguish between ideas, and expression of ideas? When would copyright arise in a dance work? What sorts of fixation might be used? Which kinds of work must be ‘original’ to enjoy copyright protection?

List all the elements to be considered in dealing with issues about originality. Which do you consider the most significant? Can you think of two similar, but independent and original dance works? When is your dance work original for the purposes of copyright?

When you watch the film, are you able to distinguish between ideas and the expression of ideas?

Ideas, expression, fixation and originality [Word document]

Task (III)

Who may be treated as the author of the copyright in a dance? Can you give examples in which a dance might be a work of joint authorship, and when a dance might be co-authored and who the authors might be?

Give examples of employer/employee relations in the dance community where copyright will be owned by the employer. Who is the employer?

When you have watched the film clip, are you able to identify the copyright author of the dance? Are you able to identify the copyright owner? What extra information might you need, if any, to answer these questions.

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Reflections

Why is it important to identify what is owned? You can respond to this question in one or more of the following ways:

  • a reflective blog/vlog post
  • a social media post
  • raise it as a discussion point at your organisation – make notes and reflect

Don’t forget to:

  • send your blog post to invisiblediff@gmail.com
  • share any useful links/resources you’ve discovered
  • use the course hashtag #resinctoolkit