The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988) is the UK law that gives an individual or organisation the right to control a piece of original work. The Act applies equally to digital content, such as music and movies, as it does to content in other forms, such as a painting or piece of sheet music. Software licences are used to indicate to the user how the software can be used. At an advanced level you can learn about the way digital content can be protected through the use of rights management and software activation.
The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988) is legislation that allows an individual or organisation that has created a piece of original work, e.g. a book or painting, the right to control the use of their work. The owner’s rights cover the way that the work can be used, e.g. copying, adapting, broadcasting, or lending. The legislation covers:
Digital assets have the same protection as those produced in traditional form. The work does not have to be labelled as copyright.
The Copyright (Computer Programs) Regulations 1992 extended the Act to cover computer programs.
Most work is protected by copyright law for 70 years after the death of the author or composer, although some categories have shorter protection periods, including broadcasts (50 years) and computer-generated work (50 years).
A patent allows an original idea (within certain fields) to be protected. The shape or configuration of a product or item is protected by design rights. A trademark protects indications (e.g. a logo) of the commercial source of a product or service and remain in force as long as they are actively used or registered.
In this video, the creator and founder of Raspberry Pi, Eben Upton, discusses how trademarks allow him to defend the Raspberry Pi brand.
Developers release software under a licence. Software users do not own the software, but they are permitted to use it if they agree to the licence terms. The licence may, or may not, place restrictions on the user. Software that does not place restrictions on users is known as free software. Free software gives users the freedom to run, study, distribute, and modify the software. Nearly all open-source software is free software, but there are exceptions. For example, some open-source software does not give users the to make a modified version and then use it privately, meaning it cannot be classified as free software.
Software is said to be proprietary if it is non-free, meaning there are
restrictions placed on the user. Examples of these restrictions include:
Computer networks and especially the internet have made it very easy to share files. Whilst this helps authors who wish to share their work, it is not good for authors whose work is copied and/or shared illegally. Some people think that because something is freely accessible on the internet, it can be copied legally. However, this is not true. To use material that is protected by the legislation, you need to have permission. This may be freely given, or the owner may insist on being named as the creator or owner of the copyright. A Creative Commons licence allows the owner to be attributed, or choose how others can share, use, or build on the material.
Piracy is the illegal copying of software or data (e.g. movies) without regard to copyright. The internet has made the distribution of pirated materials much easier to achieve, and harder for law enforcement agencies to detect.
Most modern content producers often employ some form of digital
rights management (DRM) to prevent unauthorised distribution of their
material. DRM is a set of access control tools that can limit the time
period in which the material can be used (e.g. when renting a movie online),
the number of devices it can be used upon, or prevent the copying of the data
altogether. Some video games have famously included code to detect when
a pirate copy of the game is being played and to cause strange things to
happen within the game to inconvenience the player. For example, the 2000
video game Spyro: Year of the Dragon used checksums on the game data to check
if it was a pirate copy. If piracy was detected, it caused the player
to randomly teleport to different places in the game and to be forced to
repeat levels that had been previously completed.