Infringement of Copyright
I’m a member of Fugleognatur, a wonderful source of information and expert help on all questions arising from Danish flora and fauna.
The forum has recently revised its terms and conditions relating to ownership of data and photographs entered on the database. This led to quite a long thread of correspondence, which eventually settled that the ownership of photographs naturally resides with the photographer.
It was a coincidence that the most recent copy of Update * had an article on copyright at the same time.
The article explains that Danske Dagblades Forening were scanning newspaper pages, turning them into text and sending these onto their clients – a sort of electronic cutting service. They sent a snippet of 11 highlighted words to a client – commercial use. And were found guilty of copyright infringement.
The article states (and now I had better be careful not to infringe copyright – although I should be safe, this blog is not for commercial use) that
“Anyone who thought quoting a few word would not infringe copyright, as long as you acknowledged the source, should beware.”
This is because “11 words may convey the originality of the whole.”
So copyright rules are still an incredibly difficult concept for anyone to grasp, all we can do is to be really aware of the issue.
* Library and Information Update, September 2009, page 9.