Strictly Come Copyright

The Copyright lecture started… well it didn’t start when it was supposed to, so me and the rest of the intrepid investigative explorers decided to try and find out what was going on. An hour later following a trip to the faculty office, the Thomas Atkinson Building and generally a lot of wandering around. We decided to have a quick look into the stripe just to check. Lo and behold it was just about to start, apparently there had been a mix up with the drama lot so it had been moved back. Thrilled to hear it was still on, we enthusiastically bounded into the lecture theatre and took our seats (I wouldn’t normally advertise my mistakes but, in the previous line, instead of enthusiastically, for some reason I’d written atheistically. The picture in my head made me laugh so I thought I‘d share).

Mr Hodges opened the Lecture by telling us that a mistake with copyright could cost us our money, our job, or our house. Luckily at the moment I have none of these things to lose, but I have a feeling that this will stick with me for a while. He proceeded to give us several example of things that are copyrighted. I have never put much thought to this before, but I imagined that it would involve music and movies as well as logos. Turns out that basically everything you’ve ever seen is protected by copyright law. On a CD jacket there is the type face, the photo/drawing, the logo, the sound recording not to mention the songs and performance of the artists. Another good example is the television program ‘Strictly Come Dancing’. when you watch this program the copyrighted material starts at the songs and choreography, down to the clothing and the set itself.

Copyright can cost productions a lot of money as the majority of the time they will have to pay the creator/author/designer to use their material. There are, however, some exceptions when copyright will not have to be paid. In the case of songs,  a recording’s copyright will last for 50 years before it is no longer mandatory to pay royalties to the artist. This has caused some unhappy murmurings recently as, with the advent of ever more powerful drugs, artists are starting to live longer, and have started to put up a fuss when they stop getting royalties. most notably at the moment is Cliff Richard (poor old Cliff’s run out of money I guess).

Halfway through the lecture we were treated to a short film of an opera. Afterwards we were asked to list as many copyrighted things as possible to the best of my memory, during the credits at the start there were: the author of the opera,  the produce, the conductor, the orchestra, the director, the main actors, and various designers. During the actual opera, there were: paintings, costumes, clocks, wigs, and many, many others. This was more to show how many copyrights have to be checked, approved and paid for, during the making of any kind of production.

Perhaps one of the more important things to take away from the lecture was that an idea cannot be copyrighted. If you were to come up with a brilliant new game show that doesn’t at all resemble X-Factor or Family Fortunes, or any successful current show. For the love of God, don’t share your idea with any shady exec-types. They will steal it! And you won’t see so much as a shiny penny of it. However, once an idea is published, it becomes copyright protected. This is what you have to do to make a million. Publish your idea, then sell it.

The best part of the lecture for me was when, after about an hour and a half of this excitement, Mr Hodges asked if their were any journalists in the room. The 5 or 6 of us who had made it there raised our hands. “Well” he said, “you don’t have to worry about this as anything you write about will be covered by fair comment… Great.