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6023 results in Facet Publishing

Page 154 of 302

  • 19 - Universal Decimal Classification 1: general properties and basic number building

  • Vanda Broughton
  • Book:
    Essential Classification
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 July 2015, pp 241-264

  • Summary

    The Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) was devised in the early 20th century by two Belgians, Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine. Otlet and La Fontaine had conceived the idea of making a bibliography of all works published since the invention of printing – a project that was just about feasible a hundred years ago – and they wanted a system for the subject organization of their bibliography.

    At that time there were several bibliographic classification schemes available to them, but the one that impressed them the most was Dewey's Decimal Classification, then in its fifth edition. They did not find in the DDC exactly what they wanted, and so they made some amendments and additions of their own to create what was the first edition of the Universal Decimal Classification, published between 1905 and 1907.

    UDC is thus unique among the well-known schemes in that it wasn't originally intended to arrange a physical collection of documents, but rather to organize a bibliography in the form of a card catalogue. As a consequence, the decisions that were made about its structure and function at that time placed the main emphasis on its use as a tool for retrieval. Great importance was attached to its ability to provide very detailed subject description, particularly for complex topics, and this was achieved at the expense of simplicity in the notation. This has continued to be an important characteristic of UDC, which means it is favoured in situations where retrieval is more important than browsing.

    General characteristics of UDC

    The scheme is very much more flexible than the enumerative schemes we've considered in previous chapters, and it can be used to create very detailed classmarks for documents with complicated subject content. As a result it has been a popular choice for use in scientific and technical libraries, and those that deal with large amounts of technical literature and reports. In the UK it can be found in a number of research establishments such as the Polar Research Institute, in government libraries at the Ministry of Defence and DEFRA, and in large academic scientific collections, such as the library at Imperial College (although Imperial is currently in the process of re-classifying).

  • 20 - Universal Decimal Classification 2: auxiliary tables

  • Vanda Broughton
  • Book:
    Essential Classification
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 July 2015, pp 265-298

  • Summary

    Auxiliary tables in the UDC

    One of the principal features of Otlet's original scheme was the introduction of auxiliary tables. These auxiliary tables provide an economical way of scheduling the sort of terms that occur over and over again in the subjects of documents. When we looked at LCC we saw that concepts such as periodicals or geographical treatment were repeated very many times in the schedules, and that this repetition leads to very lengthy schedules. In UDC such terms are listed only once, in a series of special tables which can be used to qualify classes in the main tables. Although other schemes do make use of auxiliaries, UDC is unusual in the number of tables that it provides.

    The auxiliaries in UDC greatly increase the specificity that you can achieve in subject description, and they are one way in which very detailed and expressive classmarks can be built.

    The tables which can be applied to any classmark throughout the scheme are known as systematic auxiliary tables. Other auxiliaries exist which are used only in particular subjects, and they are called special auxiliary tables.

    Systematic auxiliaries

    The systematic auxiliaries provide for:

  • • concepts that relate to the form of documents

  • • very commonly encountered subject concepts.

    • There are three tables concerned with form, and they cover:

  • • the language of the document

  • • the physical form, or medium, of the document

  • • the form of presentation.

    • You will notice that these are concepts that don't tell us anything about the content of a document, but they are nevertheless useful to express since readers may look for them.

    The rest of the systematic auxiliaries deal with subject-related concepts. You'll remember some of these concepts from the chapters on content analysis. The common subject concepts include:

  • • places

  • • periods

  • • ethnicity and nationality

  • • persons

  • • materials

  • • properties

  • • relations, processes and operations.

    • Each of these auxiliaries is introduced by its own particular symbol, and we'll look at each in turn. Generally, you can add a systematic auxiliary directly to the main table number which it qualifies. Because each auxiliary has a distinctive symbol to introduce it you don't need to alter either the main table number or the auxiliary when you're adding them together.

  • 7 - Special cases

  • Tim Padfield
  • Book:
    Copyright for Archivists and Records Managers
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 July 2015, pp 201-242

  • Summary

    Republic of Ireland: copyright history

    The Copyright Act 1911, when it was passed, applied to southern Ireland as part of the UK. When the two parliaments for the south and north were established by the Government of Ireland Act 1920, copyright was a subject reserved by Westminster. That Act was repealed in 1922, when the south became a self-governing dominion within the British Empire. The 1911 Act applied to self-governing dominions only if their local legislatures decided that it should, and local legislatures could amend or repeal that or any other Westminster copyright legislation so long as no existing rights were prejudiced. The Irish Free State duly provided its own copyright law by the Industrial and Commercial Property (Protection) Act 1927. This applied retrospectively to works created on or after 6 December 1921 but material created before that date continued to be protected under the 1911 Act. The Republic of Ireland ceased to be a dominion in 1949 by the Ireland Act 1949, and since then the Republic has twice passed new copyright legislation: the Copyright Act 1963 (see 7.1.4) and the Copyright Act 2000 (see 7.1.5). Strong similarities to the law in the UK remain, however, because the law of the Irish Republic is rooted in the common law tradition (see 1.1.1, 1.2.2), and both countries are now required to implement the harmonized aspects of European law, such as those for the duration of copyright (see 1.2.8, 2.1.28, 9.1.3).

    1911 ss25, 26; 1920 s4(1); 1927 (Ireland) s174

    Republic of Ireland: works created before 6 December 1921

    The provisions of the Copyright Act 1911 continued to apply in the Republic, in particular to the subsistence of copyright and the ownership of it in works created in Ireland before 6 December 1921 (but see 7.1.5). This means that, for works to which the 1911 Act continues to apply:

  • • the first owner of a commissioned engraving, photograph or portrait is normally the person who commissioned it (see 3.2.19)

  • • ownership of copyrights assigned before 1 July 1912 may have reverted to the author's heirs (see 3.3.13)

  • • where a testator who was the author bequeathed to a particular person or institution a manuscript of a work, the ownership of the manuscript is taken to be prima facie proof of ownership of the copyright, unless the copyright was explicitly bequeathed elsewhere (see 3.3.3)

  • 23 - Classification in digital space

  • Vanda Broughton
  • Book:
    Essential Classification
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 July 2015, pp 339-374

  • Summary

    Reading the parts of this book dealing with the major classification schemes and lists of subject headings you may have assumed a context of physical collections and print publications. In fact the role played by classificatory structures and classification theory in organizing and discovering online resources is considerable; it can range from the application of traditional classification and subject cataloguing tools to electronic publications, and the use of controlled vocabularies and taxonomies in managed information services in the commercial sector, to the development of more advanced types of automatic classification in the world of the web.

    One of the most important functions of a classification is as a representation of a subject field or domain through the concepts, terms and relationships it contains. Viewed in this way, a classification can act as a model and a map of the domain, and in those roles it helps with organization of material, location and indexing, browsing and searching. The idea of a classification as a model is important (Figure 23.1). It is like other scientific models in that it provides a simplified, but more understandable, view of a real-world situation; just as the ‘molecular model’ of the solar system helps us grasp the idea of the relative position of the sun and the planets, and planetary motion, even though the real thing is not so exact, so the classification model of a subject or domain allows us to work with the information there. It enables us to generalize about the nature of knowledge, and to organize and retrieve it in ways that can be understood by end-users, although information is much more chaotic and disorganized than we might like to believe. In particular it gives us a framework for expressing and managing complexity in subject content in a predictable and logical manner. Although the model in Figure 23.1 is a two-dimensional one, a classification model can be in as many dimensions as you wish, and the relationships as numerous as are needed.

    The structure and logic of the classification can also provide a basis for machines rather than humans to carry out all of those activities. For example, uncontrolled words and phrases extracted automatically from text can be mapped to the controlled vocabulary of the classification in order to assign subject metadata, or to better formulate searches.

  • 6 - Copyright in the electronic environment

  • Tim Padfield
  • Book:
    Copyright for Archivists and Records Managers
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 July 2015, pp 183-200

  • Summary

    What is different about the electronic environment?

    For many purposes, existing copyright law applies in the same way in the electronic environment as it does to traditional formats. Electronic materials are protected by copyright, and the copyright owners enjoy much the same rights over them as they do over works on paper. Users, too, enjoy much the same exceptions to copyright, allowing them to make use of copyright works for non-commercial research and private study for instance. There are good reasons, though, for discussing copyright in the electronic environment as a distinct issue:

  • • Although copyright rules still apply, it is very much easier to infringe and the consequences of infringement can be much more damaging, so rights owners are very much more inclined to be energetic in their efforts to prevent or punish infringement than they are with the older media.

  • • The nature of the internet as a global communications medium makes copyright, an essentially territorial right which differs from country to country, very difficult to apply.

  • • The 1988 Act was first drafted in a pre-digital age though much effort has gone into keeping it up to date. It is normally, but not always, safe to assume that a permitted act is permitted in any medium, so that for instance copying may be digital as well as hard copy.

  • • Some special provisions have been made in the law that apply only, or particularly, to electronic materials.

    • Use of electronic materials

    Since for the most part the law applies to electronic works in the same way as to paperbased ones, the same uses are allowed. Thus, fair dealing (see 5.3.7–14, 5.3.19) and library and archive copying (see 5.4) are permitted, unless there are special provisions restricting them, as there are, for instance, with public record databases (see 8.2). However, it should be borne in mind that fair dealing for the purposes of private study and non-commercial research is limited to those purposes, as is copying under the library and archive regulations, for the use of a single individual only. They do not, for instance, permit communication of the work to the public (see 5.1.6), such as on a website, nor do they permit the user to transmit electronic copies to other people by email.

  • 4 - The variety of classification: systems and structures

  • Vanda Broughton
  • Book:
    Essential Classification
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 July 2015, pp 13-22

  • Summary

    So far we've looked at fairly informal examples of sorting and arrangement – what might be done on a pragmatic basis and at a local level. One wouldn't expect the supermarket classification, or a rough arrangement of literature books, to be written down or distributed for others to use. The world is full of examples of this sort of local or personal classification; office filing systems are a typical example, as is any arrangement of the content of your kitchen cupboards or your wardrobe.

    At a more public level there are a vast number of formal, published classifications of an immense variety of entities and phenomena. A search for ‘classification of ‘ using Google will return you in excess of 360 million sites. Among these are classifications for proteins, reptiles, disabilities, wetlands, daffodils, scorpions, depression, learning skills, theories of divine action, caviar, parachutes, subtle changes in facial expression, portable fire extinguishers, Bible commands, angles, thunderstorms, millionaires, chickens and tea.

    Scientific classifications and taxonomies

    For the most part these are classifications of different sorts of physical and biological entities, and they're constructed using the fundamental principles of grouping and ordering, which we discussed in Chapter 3, in a more extended, rigorous and systematic manner. The methodology they employ goes back to the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who, in the Organon, laid down the rules for creating categories of objects in the natural world. Aristotle produced the first classification for natural history, and the methods he used endure to the present day. He grouped natural phenomena (plants, birds, animals, people) into sets based on attributes or properties relating to their external appearance and behaviour, and he ordered these groups on the basis of their comparative similarity (or dissimilarity).

    A classification of this kind is referred to as a taxonomy (from the Greek taxis meaning arrangement or order, and nomos, meaning law or rule). Although information managers often use the term taxonomy today to mean any vaguely structured set of terms in a subject area, taxonomy is a major scientific discipline with a highly developed, exact and complex methodology, usually supported by computational techniques.

  • 7 - Order in the classification scheme

  • Vanda Broughton
  • Book:
    Essential Classification
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 July 2015, pp 41-56

  • Summary

    Now that we have examined the ways in which the internal structure of a scheme might be organized, we'll consider the broader question of order throughout the scheme.

    Main classes

    In Chapter 4, we looked at the difference between scientific and bibliographic classifications, and at the fact that the bibliographic scheme is usually an aspect classification. That is to say, the organization of topics is based on areas of study or activity, and the first division of the scheme is into disciplines or subject domains.

    This first division of a classification creates what are called main classes. A rough definition of a main class is that it corresponds to a single notational character: for example, in UDC, class 2 is the main class Religion, and in LCC, class N is the main class Fine Arts. You can see from Figure 7.1 that the number of main classes depends on the notation used. Not everybody would agree with this interpretation, and another understanding of main classes is that they equate to the traditional disciplines. In these terms, chemistry would always be a main class, whether it has notational main class status (as in the Bibliographic Classification's class C) or not (as in DDC's class 54).

    Whatever the notational status of a main class, it is clear that the classification must treat it as a coherent subject. The different aspects of geography as studied in the UK aren't brought together in DDC, so students of this subject using a DDC classified library will find their books in several different places. It could therefore be said that DDC has no main class ‘geography’.

    What constitutes a main class varies from one scheme to another, and the provision of main classes for unusual subjects can encourage the adoption of that classification in special libraries. For example, the Bibliographic Classification is the only one to have a main class for social welfare, and this has led to its adoption by many social service libraries and libraries of charitable organizations. LCC is the only scheme that has main classes for military and naval science.

    Cross-disciplinary studies and phenomena classes

    Users of the big general classification schemes will have trouble in classifying books about cross-disciplinary studies.

  • 2 - Copyright protection

  • Tim Padfield
  • Book:
    Copyright for Archivists and Records Managers
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 July 2015, pp 17-66

  • Summary

    Types of work

    Copyright law classifies works into defined types, for which the provisions differ. For archivists and records managers the most important are literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works, films and sound recordings. Other types of work (broadcasts and typographical arrangements) present problems less often. The definitions themselves have varied with successive legislative changes, but those in the 1988 Act (as subsequently amended) normally apply to all works created before and still in copyright at commencement and are thus the only ones that need be of concern for most purposes. Cases where earlier definitions still apply (notably pre-1912 maps, see 7.14.2–3, and pre- 1957 films, see 2.4.1) are set out in the descriptions of the appropriate categories.

    1988 (CDPA) Sch 1 para 3

    The nature of works

    A single item may consist of more than one work, of different types. An academic journal, for instance, might contain several articles, each of which could be a separate literary work, together with illustrations, each of which could be a separate artistic work, and some music, which could be a musical work. The journal as a whole might qualify for protection as a compilation (see 2.1.10, 2.2.3), and will certainly have protection for its typographical arrangement (see 2.6.15). Similarly a song consists of music and words; each has its own copyright and there is no distinct copyright in the song as a whole although the same person may be the author of both. Also, each separate entry in a diary is a separate copyright work while the diary as a whole is another. In an archive, deeds, for instance, are primarily literary works, but any plans in or on them are separately protected as artistic works. Likewise, a single file might contain minutes and papers produced by the creating body, letters, drawings and photographs received from private individuals or other bodies and companies, and published papers and maps including some in Crown copyright. Each separate item would qualify as a copyright work with its own authorship, duration and ownership, so the use of the whole file could require permission from many different people and bodies.

    A single item may also qualify for copyright under more than one description (see 2.2.2, 2.3.2).

  • 8 - Other intellectual property rights

  • Tim Padfield
  • Book:
    Copyright for Archivists and Records Managers
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 July 2015, pp 243-276

  • Summary

    Definition

    Moral rights are the rights, even more intangible than copyright, that attach to the author's personality as expressed in his or her work. They recognize that the products of the human mind and spirit are so closely tied to the personality of the author that protection is needed, since the corruption of the one inevitably damages the other. They are of great importance in some parts of Europe, notably France and Germany, but are of much less significance in the UK, where emphasis has traditionally been given to economic rights rather than the personality of the author (see 1.1.1). As a result, they were not for the most part recognized in the UK until the passing of the 1988 Act. Some of the elements of moral rights were covered by such things as the law of defamation, but copyright law was silent on the subject except through the creation by the 1956 Act of a civil offence of false attribution of a copyright literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work. Action had to be taken in 1988 in order to bring the UK into line with the provisions of the Paris Act (1971) of the Berne Convention (see 1.2.6). The result is a group of rights strictly limited in application and scope, which apply to the author as an individual. They are the right of attribution (to be identified as the author), the right of integrity (to object to changes to the work), the right to object to false attribution, and (not really a moral right at all) the right of privacy of a person who commissions certain photographs or films.

    For moral rights in performances see 8.1.11, 8.5.3.

    1956 s43

    Importance for archives

    For the most part moral rights do not have a direct bearing on the work of archivists but they could affect anyone wishing to publish or exhibit a copyright work, and since archivists may at times wish to do both things, and will be called upon to advise others who wish to do them, they must be aware of them. Moral rights in the UK are hedged about with many limitations and exceptions, not all of which can be described in this book.

  • 9 - Content analysis 2: practical constraints

  • Vanda Broughton
  • Book:
    Essential Classification
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 July 2015, pp 75-88

  • Summary

    In the last chapter we looked at how to make a document analysis on an objective basis, identifying all the likely sought terms and arranging them in an ‘ideal’ order.

    In the real world two things will cause you to make some modifications to your ideal statement of content:

  • • the operating rules of the classification you're using

  • • the needs of the users as reflected in the library's own practices.

    • The first of these will be covered in the chapters on how to apply particular classifications. In this chapter we shall look at how to modify your objective statements to meet local requirements.

    Broad and close classification

    The problem of how exactly books need to be arranged is an old and thorny one. Librarians have usually decided to make precise classmarks for their books, whereas booksellers make broader groupings. The philosophy underpinning this is doubtless that the bookseller wishes the customer to browse, and to look at as many books as possible. Librarians, on the other hand, want readers to find the book most closely related to their information needs.

    When the retrieval function is more important than browsing, documents must be given classmarks that reflect as nearly as possible their subjects. We call this close classification.

    In the UK in the 1980s, a fashion arose for much less precise classification, the remains of which practice can be seen in many public libraries today. Instead of applying a conventional classification such as DDC, books were allocated to a category such as travel, sport or hobbies. Such a system was known as categorization or reader interest classification. The case for such schemes was founded on users’ alleged lack of understanding of traditional classification (which is probably true), but savings in time and money undoubtedly played a part. A balance was being struck between the effort expended in cataloguing books and the perceived lack of need for this at the consumer end.

    This is an extreme example of the conflict between broad and close classification, between browsing and retrieval, but many libraries nowadays will give some consideration to how much time they spend on creating records and whether the work involved is really necessary.

  • 3 - Ownership

  • Tim Padfield
  • Book:
    Copyright for Archivists and Records Managers
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 July 2015, pp 67-98

  • Summary

    Definition

    Although a work might otherwise be eligible for copyright protection, by reason of such things as its originality and the date of its creation or publication or the date of the author's death, it only ‘qualifies’ for protection under UK law if particular conditions are fulfilled at the time of creation or publication. In practice, most works in UK archives that are eligible for copyright also fulfil the qualification requirements and are therefore protected by the terms of UK law.

    There are two grounds for qualification of all works except broadcasts, only one of which needs to be satisfied for the work to qualify, and both relate to the source country. They are the status of the author of the work and the place of publication. By definition, an unpublished work can qualify only under the former.

    A broadcast qualifies if the place of transmission is a qualifying country (defined as for publication, see 3.1.3, but see also 2.6.9–12).

    1988 (CDPA) ss153–162

    Author of the work

    A work qualifies for protection under UK copyright law if, at the time the work was made or published, the author was a British citizen, a British Dependent Territories citizen, a British national (overseas), a British overseas citizen, a British subject or a British protected person, an individual living in the UK or in one of the countries currently recognized as providing qualification (see 3.1.3–4), or a body incorporated under UK law or the law of one of the countries currently recognized as providing qualification. However, if a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work was published before 1 June 1957 in one of the countries not then recognized as providing qualification, it cannot qualify on grounds of authorship even if the author is from a qualifying country now. An unpublished work of any date qualifies for protection now if the author was from a country that is now a qualifying country.

    Works by people of the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man and the British overseas territories – Anguilla, Bermuda, British Antarctic Territory, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Cyprus Sovereign Bases, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Pitcairn, St Helena (with Ascension and Tristan da Cunha), South Georgia (with the South Sandwich Islands) and Turks & Caicos Islands – all qualify in the UK on the basis of authorship.

  • 3 - First principles of classification

  • Vanda Broughton
  • Book:
    Essential Classification
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 July 2015, pp 7-12

  • Summary

    Two ideas are fundamental to any system of classification: grouping and ordering. Grouping is the primary act of classification and one that is inherent in human thinking, as we saw in the introduction. We can all classify in this sense quite instinctively.

    Grouping

    Exercise 3.1

    Consider the following sets of concepts, and identify the odd one out in each.

    1 banana sausage aubergine cauliflower

    2 spade rake trowel frying pan

    3 karate kung-fu knitting kick-boxing

    4 Paris Rome Idaho Cairo

    I hope your answers will be:

    1 sausage (because the others are fruits and vegetables)

    2 frying pan (because the others are garden implements)

    3 knitting (because it is not a martial art)

    4 Idaho (because it is not a capital city)

    This may seem to be a trivial exercise, but it serves to illustrate the essence of classification – the act of putting like with like and separating unlike – and it shows that at the broad level it is quite easy to do. Hopefully you were able not only to group the concepts, but also to identify the principles by which you did this, so that there was a logical and philosophical basis to your classification. The principle used to create a group is sometimes called the principle of division or characteristic of division: this is the technical term for the property or attribute that all the members of a group have in common.

    Ordering

    This process of grouping together related terms or concepts is central to a classification scheme, and it forms the first stage in constructing a classification. The second stage is to decide on the relationships between groups, since this determines the order in which the groups will be arranged.

    Let's start by making some groups within the general area of vegetables. By putting like with like, we could organize the carrots, parsnips and turnips to make a class of root vegetables. Now we need to consider what will be placed next. We might want to position other groups of vegetables (leafy vegetables, and pulses) near to the roots, and then locate the whole class of vegetables near to other crops, such as fruits and cereals.

  • Section 1 - Definition and law

  • Graham P. Cornish
  • Book:
    Copyright
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    17 June 2015, pp 1-6

  • Summary

    What is copyright?

    Copyright is part of a batch of rights, usually called intellectual property rights (IPRs), given to the creators of various types of works. Which right is found in a work depends on its nature but the major strands to IPR are patents, trade and services marks, design right, registered design and copyright. These can overlap to some degree and more than one right may be found in a work. This book concentrates on copyright.

    Because it is a property right, copyright is governed by the usual rules of property. The owner can sell it, lend or rent it, leave it in a will or just give it away; similarly others can buy or hire it through licences or other agreements. The idea behind copyright is rooted in certain fundamental ideas about creativity and possession. Basically, it springs from the idea that anything we create is an extension of ‘self’ and should be protected from general use by anyone else. Coupled with this is the idea that the person creating something has exclusive rights over the thing created, partly for economic reasons but also because of this extension of ‘self’ idea. Copyright is therefore important to ensure the continued growth of writing, performing and creating generally. If there were no copyright protection there would be little stimulus for people to create anything, as other people would be able to take the work and use it in any way they wanted. This mirrors the usual rules of possessing property. Copyright law aims to protect this growth but, at the same time, tries to ensure that some access to copyright works is allowed as well. Without this access creators would be starved of ideas and information to create more copyright material.

    Is copyright a monopoly?

    Not entirely. If two people create the same thing independently of each other and without actually copying what the other person wrote or made, then both can claim copyright in what they created, even if they are identical.

    Example: Two people stand in exactly the same place and take a photograph. The photos are virtually identical but each photographer owns the copyright in their photo because they did not copy someone else's work.

  • Section 2 - What is covered by copyright

  • Graham P. Cornish
  • Book:
    Copyright
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    17 June 2015, pp 7-12

  • Summary

    What things are covered by copyright?

    Virtually anything that is written, expressed in graphic form or recorded in any way, or anything that can be made by a human being, but not usually things made by a mechanical process, is capable of being protected by copyright. The law divides these items into various classes and all aspects of them are dealt with separately in the following pages.

    Does absolutely anything in these groups qualify for copyright?

    No. There are three tests to qualify for copyright and any work must pass all three. They are that the work must be original, recorded and created by a qualifying person.

    What does ‘original’ mean?

    The law does not say, but the idea is that, to be protected, the author must have contributed quite a lot of their own ideas or skills to the making of the work. Works that are merely trivial will not qualify as they do not demonstrate any originality. Anything that is merely a copy of something that already exists cannot be protected by copyright as a new work.

    What constitutes trivial?

    This is not defined but a primitive doodle or a simple ‘x’ would not qualify, although what is ‘simple’ and what is not is open to debate!

    When does a work based on another work become original?

    When sufficient time, effort, technical skills and knowledge have been used to make it reasonably clear the work is a new one and not merely a slavish copy.

    Example: If you write your own poem about Jack and Jill, it is protected. If you simply reproduce the well known nursery rhyme with one or two minor changes, the reproduction is not original and not protected – but if you photocopy or scan the poem the typographical arrangement may be protected (see Section 4.88 and following).

    What about digitization and the images which it produces?

    This is an area where the law is unclear. Generally speaking, it is held that if the work is digitized using a scanner and there is no human intervention (like a photocopy and producing a pdf. file that cannot be manipulated) then there is unlikely to be any new copyright work created.

Page 154 of 302