UK Patent Office Issues Public Information Notice On Digital Copying

The UK Patent Office has issued for general public distribution a five-page Copyright Notice (1/2014, dated March 2014) (Notice) entitled “Copyright Notice: digital images, photographs and the internet”. A feature of the Notice is its clear, concise and non-technical language. It evidently is intended for wide distribution to the general public. In particular, the latter part of the Notice has been drafted in a question-and-answer format which lends itself to disseminating to a wide audience some useful and very basic information that underlies the law of copyright in the marketplace. For example, here are three of the ten questions posed, each of which is followed by a plain-language response from the Patent Office (follow the link above to find the responses):

“I want to use my own images on the internet” “I want to use images I found online” “I want to stop other people using photos that I uploaded on a social media website”

And, of course, there is one section on the answer to this interesting and, for some, vexed question: “What are the consequences of copyright infringement?” It seems likely that any UK law firm would want to consider providing a link in its web site to this one. Summary by: Richard Potter