Copyright, Permissions and Online Rules

This month one of our Underwire subscribers asked a great question about copyright and whether the rules for online publishing are different than those of print publishing.

* What are the copyright laws in relation to the practice of posting other people’s full articles on your website?
* Do you need author and publisher permission?
* How are the rules for online publishing and print publishing different?

It is a complex question, and I’m not an expert on copyright, but disclaimers aside, here’s my opinion.

Seek Permission

The internet is a vast resource of excellent articles, images, photos, and videos--all things that we want to filter and sort and compile in order to share with people within our social network.

Social bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us, ma.gnolia and StumbleUpon, have sprung up to support this miraculous tenacity we have for organizing data.

But what happens when we want to go beyond quoting reasonable amounts of text and linking back to the original source?

In this example, our Underwire subscriber wants to create a database of research articles and allow users to download those full articles. How does copyright apply? Who do they have to seek permission from in order to store these articles in a database?

See, it gets more complex right?

In the case of copyright materials (anything not licensed under Creative Commons--and even then, pay attention), you need to get permission to essentially re-publish these materials.

The question then becomes, who do you need to get permission from? The author? The publisher?

Understand Who Can Grant Permission to Share, Re-use and Re-publish

The answer is that it is dependent on the author-publisher contract. In many cases, when an author publishes an article in a journal or other publication, they sign an agreement with the publisher, which grants the publisher the exclusive rights to that article. In some cases this includes the right to self-archive, i.e., to keep a copy of their own work in an online CV or on their own website or to submit the work to an open repository.

If the author has not retained these rights, you must seek permission from the publisher. If the author has retained those rights, you must seek permission from the author.

So how do you tell who has the rights to the work if the copyright message does not clearly identify the rights holder?

I say cover your bases and make sure you seek permission from the publisher and author. They will be able to determine who has the legal right to grant you permission. Then you must make sure that you have, in writing, permission from the entity that controls the legal right to grant permission.

Each situation must be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

The Short Answer

The short answer is that you can create a database of citations with links to original materials. As soon as you want to deal with archiving full articles, you must go through the process of checking how the rights to the work are assigned, confirming who the rights holder is, and, if necessary, requesting permission.

For more information on copyright:
The Canadian Intellectual Property Office offers a guide to copyrights.

The Creative Commons website explains the licenses and legal concepts behind them.