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Copyright for Solent Staff

CLA

The Copyright Licensing Agency provides the CLA HE licence which the University uses for much of its copying from books, articles, and magazines. The rules around the licence can be summarised by the following FAQs.

Who can copy under the CLA licence?

If you are copying for personal use - your research or study - then you can make the copies, whether physical or digital, yourself.

If you want to use a digital copy in your teaching - to provide the copy to your students - then the copying must be done by Solent Library's Digidocs service

What can be copied under the CLA licence?

The licence covers textual and still images in books, journals, conference proceedings and magazines. Note that newspapers are covered by the NLA licence instead.

If a book, journal, or magazine is published in the UK, either in print or online, then it is likely that we will be able to copy from it under the licence. If the publisher is based overseas, then we may still be able to copy from it under the CLA licence.

The Library does not necessarily have to own a copy of the work to provide a scan from it. We will normally try to buy content on a reading list, but where this is not feasible we may instead choose to pay a copyright fee to obtain a digital copy of the relevant chapter or article.

The CLA provide a Check Permissions tool to enable us to check whether a resource is covered by their licence.

How much can be copied under the CLA licence?

The total amount of copying for a single module or individual is limited to whichever is the greater of:

  • 10% of the total publication (e.g., book, magazine issue, journal issue)
  • 1 chapter of a book, article from a magazine/journal, scene from a play, poem/story from an anthology (the poem/story must not exceed 10 pages)

NLA

NLA Media Access provides, through the CLA, the NLA Educational Licence, which allows you to copy, either digitally or on paper (up to 250 copies), from most UK national newspapers (note that the Times Educational Supplement is excluded) and some magazines. The CLA host a list of titles covered by the NLA licence that you can check. You need to check that the title you want to copy from fits one of the three categories below:

  • It is in the UK Newspaper List, covered by the Basic License, and of Publication Type 'National',
  • It is one of our five selected regional titles: Basingstoke Gazette, Daily Echo (Bournemouth), Hampshire Chronicle (Winchester), Romsey Advertiser, Southern Daily Echo.
  • It is in the UK Magazine List and covered by the Basic License. Note that some magazines are covered by the CLA licence instead. 

Photographs and advertisements can be copied, as well as text. You can communicate these copies to students either on paper, via email or by including the material in SOL.

The NLA licence does not appear to explicitly limit the amount that can be copied, but probably the same amounts allowed by the CLA licence would be reasonable - that is one article per issue of a newspaper. All copies should be accompanied by sufficient acknowledgement and by the text "NLA Licensed Copy. No further copies may be made except under licence". 

The Library also provides electronic access to many newspapers, and linking to electronic content will probably be easier than copying under this licence. Ways to access newspaper content from the library include:

If you anticipate using newspapers extensively in your teaching, please speak to your Information Librarian about the copyright implications.

ERA

The Educational Recording Agency (ERA) provides the ERA licence for the recording and communication of free-to-air broadcasts made in the UK. While the licence only covers broadcasts made by members of ERA, it can be used in combination with the copyright exception for recordings to mean that any free-to-air broadcast in the UK can be recorded and communicated to staff and students of the University (e.g., by embedding or linking to videos in SOL pages, or using them in class), either as whole broadcasts or as clips.

Rather than having to record the broadcasts yourself, you should use a resource that the library provides called Box of Broadcasts (BoB). BoB provides recordings of all the major channels, and content from BoB can be easily embedded in SOL pages. It is also legitimate to use the catch-up streaming services of members of ERA, including the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5. Under the terms of the licence, you should include a full acknowledgement of the work, similar to the "sufficient acknowledgement" required by many copyright exceptions.

There are some things that you cannot do under the licence:

  • You cannot make public performances (i.e., play the broadcast to an audience including some non-members of the university, or where the principal purpose is not education).
  • You cannot upload content to public platforms.
  • You cannot make the recordings available to those outside the UK.
  • You cannot use the recordings for commercial (including promotional) activity.
  • You cannot change the broadcast (though note the exception for persons with disabilities).
  • You cannot circumvent Digital Rights Management technology.