The copyright owner's rights and infringement of them

Introduction

The law of copyright gives certain rights to the owner of the copyright in a work, but users of a copyright work do not themselves have rights. Rather, in accordance with the common law tradition of the public having liberties rather than rights, they can exercise certain freedoms granted to them by the law, which limit the rights of the copyright owner in various ways.

The copyright owner has the exclusive right for the limited term of copyright to do the things set out below with his or her copyright work, and to allow other people to do them (see 5.2.2). These rights are subject to the exceptions and limitations that set out the freedoms available to users (see 5.3 and 5.4) and are subject also to the rights of others (see 1.1.3). Some of these rights, known as ‘acts restricted by copyright’, are dealt with in more detail elsewhere, as shown. Carrying out any of these acts with a substantial part (see 5.3.3–7) of a copyright work without permission and outside the scope of the exceptions and limitations is an infringement (see 5.1.9–17).

Copying

The copyright owner has the exclusive right (see 5.1.1) to copy or authorise the copying of a substantial part of a work of any type (but see 5.3, 5.4). This includes any form of copying including, for instance, manual transcription, tracing, scanning, digitisation and the saving of a copy within a computer (see also 2.1.3, 5.1.8). A transient copy made by a computer simply in order to display a work on screen should not infringe (but see 6.1.2), nor does a copy made by an internet service provider in innocently transmitting a work. There is no infringement by making a similar, or even identical, work independently, but if the author of the new work had access to the earlier one he or she is assumed to have copied, even if unconsciously (and thus infringed) in the absence of evidence to the contrary (see 2.1.8, 2.1.12).

The unauthorised copying of a three-dimensional work in two dimensions (and vice versa) is certainly an infringement only if it is an artistic work. It would therefore be an infringement to make a topographical model from a map.