UK Intellectual Property Laws

How do UK Intellectual Property Laws Differ from US Laws?

In many areas, the United States and the United Kingdom are pretty similar when it comes to intellectual property laws, copyrights, the public domain, and so on. However, there are some small differences here and there. “Small differences” sounds like they may be negligible, but we all know that, when it comes to the law or anything you can be sued over, a “small difference” may amount to a “huge fine”!

One notable difference is in regards to public photography. In the United States, there are certain laws in place protecting people’s privacy, and while these laws can certainly do a lot of good, they can also cause hassles for anyone taking photographs in public. For example, in the US, if you take a photograph of say, the Statue of Liberty, and there are a whole bunch of people walking between your camera and the statue when you take the photo, you need to get a release form from every person that appears in the photograph, or you need to blur their faces out in the event that you hope to publish the photograph, even on a personal website.

Another weird little difference; The King James version of the Holy Bible is public domain throughout the world, including the United Kingdom. However, in the UK, any publishing of the King James Bible must be approved and authorized by the Crown or its agents before it can reach print. This is actually not a copyright issue so much as it is based on “royal prerogative”.

A vital difference would be the duration of a copyright. In the United States, if a film producer holds the copyright of a movie, then they hold that copyright for a different amount of time than if the film were owned by the director. If a music company owns a copyright, they own it for a different amount of time than say, a self published musician would own his own music.

The UK also has such a thing as Moral Rights. Introduced into British law thanks to the 1988 act, these rights come from the tradition of the civil law system, rather than the common law system. This act allows for authors of literary work, theatre, music, art, and film to be identified as the author of their own work, regardless of copyright holder (which is notable, since any work made in the employ of say, a producer, is copyright owned by the producer). The act also allows the artists to object to any derogatory treatment of the work, as well as the right to object to false attribution, as in a music producer giving song writing credit to the singer rather than the actual song writer.

Also worth mentioning would be that, in the United States, there is the Fair Use Doctrine. Fair Use is a doctrine based on the first amendment right to free speech, and it covers any appropriation of intellectual property to the ends of parody and criticism, or education.

As you probably know, using a movie or a book or what have you for parody or education in the United Kingdom isn’t exactly illegal, either. Certainly, the country that birthed The Sex Pistol’s “God Save the Queen” isn’t one to place outright bans on parody, however, the defense that a UK parody artist puts forth might not be as bullet-proof as the defense put forth by a US parody artist, arguing that his work falls under Fair Use. That’s not to say that you can’t do parody in the UK, just that it may be harder to defend yourself against charges of copyright infringement should you, say, lift scenes directly from an existing movie without really changing anything, or appropriate actual sound, footage, photography or other media from another work for the purpose of parody. Parody is certainly legal in the UK, but certain forms of parody, when they might also be considered copyright infringement or unauthorized use of intellectual property, are oftentimes left to the court’s discretion.

It may also be worth noting that certain parties in the UK are leaning towards legalizing things like CD ripping, wherein you would copy the data from a CD to your computer for backup. In the US, this is too often associated with pirating of software, and, certainly, in both countries, the water is kind of cloudy on this issue, with it being okay in some circumstance, but not okay in others.

So there aren’t a whole lot of major differences between the US and the UK when it comes to intellectual property law, but there are a few that you should probably keep up to date on the copyright laws in any country where you hope to create, publish, duplicate, or photograph something.