Digital Storytelling and Intellectual Property Rights

This document is for participants on Bristol Stories (BristolStories.org) workshops, and for people involved in digital storytelling projects in the UK. It should be considered as a useful guide rather than as legal advice.

What are Intellectual Property Rights all about?

Imagine you’ve bought a CD by the Rolling Stones. If Mick Jagger came to visit you and said “That’s my cd!” and took it, he’d clearly be stealing from you. But if you made 1000 copies of that CD and sold them at the local market, you’d be stealing.

It would be another kind of stealing if you learnt how to play all the songs, made a recording and pretended you’d written them yourself, and you’d probably get into trouble if you started a new rock band called “The Rolling Stones”!

Computers have made it easy to convert media into data files, and even easier to copy and distribute it, so a set of laws called “Intellectual Property Rights” (IPR) have become something we all have to be aware of. Copyright is just one of a number of these IPRs, which are used to buy and sell various “rights” to do things with, and make money from, other people’s work.

Why should I bother about Intellectual Property Rights in my digital story?

Why shouldn’t you just make a story with some music from your favourite band, some pictures off the Internet and something from TV, and some footage you’ve shot around the town, and just put it on a web site?

Because…

1. You might be fined for copyright infringement, and have to pay the legal costs too, which tend to be a lot more than the fine!
2. You may be told you can’t show your story in public or on the Internet until you’ve taken out all the offending material.
3. It’s pretty impolite to use someone else’s work without asking first!

Which restrictions apply to digital storytelling?

• Even though you’re allowed to take photos of anyone in a public place, you’re not allowed to show those pictures to anyone else without the permission of the person in the photo, even if they’re just in the background.
• Taking pictures or scans of any kind of 2D artwork without permission is against the law. This includes adverts, posters, newspapers, graffiti, paintings, even the logos and signboards on shops and patterns on clothes, carpets and wallpaper!
• If you photograph a play or record a street performer or someone giving a talk, you’ve recorded a performance and you should get permission to use it.
• If you want to use some recorded music, you not only need the permission of the musicians, but of the people that operated the recording equipment (this is known as mechanical copyright).
• Just taking images, text and sound from the Internet is not allowed! Just because it’s easy, doesn’t mean it’s legal.
• If you want to read something written by someone else (eg lyrics, literature or poetry), you’ll need permission from the author, unless they died more than 70 years ago.
• It doesn’t matter if you’re not making any money out of your story – copyright law still applies.

That doesn’t leave me much scope!

Point taken! If you strictly obeyed the letter of the law, you’d hardly be able to do anything. A legal expert could find something illegal in nearly all of the Bristol Stories. Fortunately, in order for someone to successfully sue you, they have to prove you’ve done them some damage, e.g. you’ve used something you should have paid them for, showed them in a bad light, or invaded their privacy. Most people aren’t out to sue everyone who’s ever taken a picture of them, otherwise photo-sharing sites like flickr.com and pbase.com would get sued all the time.

But don’t be lax about IPR: plenty of web sites have been closed down because they’ve been using someone else’s work without permission, and many film-makers have been unable to get their work screened because they haven’t got any permission forms.

So what can I use in my story?

Since IPR law depends a lot on whether people decide to take legal action or not, the law isn’t as obvious as something like traffic speed limits. To help you keep within IPR law, here are some things to think about before you turn on your camera or recorder, or click “Save As” on a web site:

• If you want to download files from the Internet, read the relevant section later in this document and have a look at the Creative Commons licensed sites in the Resources section of the site.
• Remember that your online story can be seen by people all over the world, including friends, family, strangers, stalkers, criminals, child abusers and so on. Despite IPR laws, anything online can be easily copied, edited and distributed. So don’t show or say anything that could cause hurt or embarrassment to anyone, or be re-used in an unkind way, or give information that might help someone commit a crime.
• You don’t have a right to take pictures of people and put them on show on the Internet; if anything, the opposite is true. If people object to being filmed or recorded, leave them alone!
• When collecting material in public places, make it obvious what you’re doing, and give people the opportunity to not be filmed or recorded if they don’t want to be. By agreeing to be filmed or recorded for your story, they’re doing you a big favour! If possible, try to take pictures so that no one that you don’t know can be recognised in them.
• If all the creators of a piece of work died more than 70 years ago, you can probably copy it but, as an example, Edward Elgar died more than 70 years ago but a CD recording of his “Pomp and Circumstance” will have been performed much more recently and mechanical and performance rights will apply.
• Think about what you’re using – does it break any IPR laws, and does it need to? Talk to your BristolStories tutor about how to make a good story whilst keeping your work within the law.
• Be polite and show empathy to the people you’re putting online, or artists whose work you’re using. Would you be upset if you were in their shoes?

Release forms

You can use just about anything in your story if people agree to it in writing, and the best way to do that is to get them to sign a “release form”, so you can prove that they’ve allowed you to do what you’ve done. The workshop facilitators can provide consent forms, or you can write your own.

At the end of the Bristol Stories course, the tutors will ask you to sign a consent form, giving Watershed and Bristol Museum the right to use your work.

What about “Fair Dealing”?

You may have heard of Fair Dealing, which many people think is a right to use small parts of someone else’s work in your own. For example, if you made a story about an artist, you might show their work in your story to illustrate it. However, Fair Dealing is not a right, it is merely a legal defence. In the example given, you might still end up in court trying to defend your infringement of the artist’s copyright.

A lot of online media is licensed under one of several “Creative Commons” licences. These give you permission to use someone else’s work subject to a number of different restrictions, depending on the licence used.

As you can see, even getting “free” media can be a complicated business, so it’s best to try to be the author of everything you use (after all, it’s your story!) However, if you just have to have some sounds or images that you can’t create yourself, read on:

First, go to one of the download sites on the Resources page. Find what you want to download and make sure that you’ve got the details of the author and of the licence that applies. This must be included in the description of your story when it goes on to BristolStories.org. For example, “Frog picture by Catherine Jones, Devon, UK, used under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 licence.” or “Drumming recording by Peter King, Bristol, UK, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 licence.”

Full descriptions of all Creative Commons licences can be seen on the Creative Commons website.

Web sites with more information about Intellectual Property Rights

• www.own-it.org – Own-It. UK information about property law in the creative sector.
• creativecommons.org – A site detailing alternatives to copyright.
• www.jisclegal.ac.uk/ipr/IntellectualProperty.htm – Information about IPR from the Joint Information Systems Committee.
• www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright – Copyright registration for creatives and information about the law.

Written by Paddy Uglow on behalf of BristolStories.org, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5