Copyright is the element of law that protects the intellectual property of an individual or organisation. It is copyright that prevents anyone using another persons work for their own benefit without permission from the creator or rights holder. Copyright is an area of civil law, and anyone believing their rights have been breached can sue for damages.
Copyright covers such things as music, literature, film and photographs. Undeveloped ideas, short slogans and catchphrases are not protected.
Copyright is vitally important in journalism both in protecting the work of a journalist, and dictating what journalists can use in their own work.
Without copyright law, the journalism industry could not exist, as there would be no value to the work done, as anyone could recycle it. Equally, journalism must not encroach on others copyright, and must strive to be original.
The one exception to this is 'fair dealing'. Fair dealing allows the use of part of a protected work in the interests of reporting current events. Fair dealing does not have specific limitations, but it is accepted that only a small portion of the original article should be used, and should only be used in incidents of public interest. Fair dealing can also be used in the context of a review, using a section of the reviewed work to supplement the piece.
In all cases, anything that has been used under fair dealing must be properly attributed to the original source, and not passed off as original work. This does not apply to sport, where rights to footage is extremely expensive and cannot be used under fair dealing.
An interesting and complex area of copyright law is that of works of parody. Music, in particular, is often used without authorisation for the purposes of parodying the original work. In such circumstances, the rights of the owner are often infringed upon, but the material is changed. These situations have worked out in vastly different ways, with some such pieces of work being unaffected by the rights holder, while others have had to remove their parody pieces from publication due to claims against them.
A recent incident in this area of law happened in America. The law regarding parody is somewhat clearer in the USA, where parody is exempt from copyright law.
A store called 'Dumb Starbucks Coffee' was opened in California, which used the Starbucks logo and trade marks, as well as providing a near identical menu. The store did not sell their products, instead giving them away for free, and claimed on its website that it was a work of parody, so as to protect itself from the famously litigious coffee chain. Situations such as this highlight interesting areas of copyright law, and in which circumstances copyrighted material can be used.
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