This book was written by a retired archivist who worked his entire career in one archival institution and who has had limited legal training. It does not constitute formal legal advice. Archivists and records managers should seek advice from a specialist intellectual property lawyer if they are in any doubt about their legal position or the legality of any action they might wish to take. Also, archivists and records managers themselves should always make abundantly clear to those who consult them that any advice they offer on copyright issues, including the subsistence and ownership of copyright in particular works, does not constitute legal advice or authority to use material protected by copyrights that they do not administer.

As this book is aimed at archivists and records managers, and at researchers in archives, and not at lawyers, it contains a lot of legal references. Although the primary authority for the law as set out here is statutes and statutory regulations, the UK legal system relies heavily for the interpretation of statutes on the decisions of judges in cases they have heard, including the judges of the Court of Justice of the European Union. As a result, the advice in this book on how the law is applied in particular circumstances derives largely from reports of those cases. The statutes and regulations alone are not enough.

The references to authorities (treaties, directives, statutes, statutory instruments, law reports) given in the footnotes to each paragraph are abbreviated; full citations appear in the table of authorities (see Chapter 11). Statutes are referred to simply by year (and, where necessary, a word), statutory instruments and regulations by their number and cases by title. There are also a few citations of legal opinions preserved in original documents; the full references are given at 10.1.

This new edition contains many relatively minor changes to the text, and it addresses some significant areas of change in an attempt to improve clarity or to reflect guidance from decisions in the courts by:

• • revising the ‘key points’ about copyright

• • giving more history about the meaning of ‘copyright’ (1.1.1, 1.2.1)

• • giving more on the definition of copyright works, in particular the nature of an archival file (2.2.3) and the important distinction between films as recordings and as ‘cinematographic’ or audiovisual works (2.1.3–4)