Dear All,
I have been looking in to copying and copyright and found some advice on the ARA website which took me by surprise.
As the advice was written a few years ago, I then checked 5th Edition of Tim Padfield’s Copyright for Archivists and Records Managers, and came to the same conclusion.
A paragraph in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1956 states that copies can be made without infringement of unpublished literary, dramatic or musical works (inc. imbedded illustrations), but not standalone artistic works;
provided that they are open to public inspection in any library, museum or similar (inc. archive) in the UK, including those run for profit; and also provided that
the work was created before 1 Aug 1989;
the author has been dead for more than 50 years; and
the work is more than 100 years old
This would seem to suggest that there would be a lot of documents held within any UK archive which could be copied for commercial purposes, without infringing the Act.
However, once the work has been published, this exception no longer applies.
Further, the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Schedule 1 paragraph 16 says that this provision from the 1956 Act continue to apply.
To me this sounds like CDPA 1988 Schedule 1 paragraph 16 is an exception which overrides the rest of this Act; and therefore a lot of archival documents can be used for publication purposes, one time only. I'm also reading this as applying to Orphan Works.
So, working on the basis that if something seems too good to be true, then it is; has anyone else tried to interpret this schedule and how have other offices approached copying for commercial purposes in light of this schedule?
Yours sincerely
Paul Beattie
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