Online Journalism News

'Chasing online copyright infringement - is it worth it?'

Journalism.co.uk spoke to John Mackenzie, partner at Pinsent Masons, about some of the legal implications of chasing copyright infringements in online publishing.

Does copyright law need updating in light of online publishing?
The law of copyright as far as it applies to the online world is pretty straightforward: if you go to the effort of writing an article and put that online then that work is protected.

There's nothing wrong with the law or copyright and that's where the legal question ends.

But then come the practicalities, the breathtaking scope of the online world, where with three clicks I can filch a book. Before it used to be quite difficult to take the printed word and copy it, but these days it's just a case of copy and paste.

Does the law place too much of a burden on the publisher to chase up infringements?
It is for the copyright owner to manage and police their copyright work. There are various techniques and devices you can use to do that from full blown monitoring of the online world, which is not cheap, but should be well within the budget of any reasonably sized publisher.

Then there's ad hoc searching and monitoring. Then there are the search engines like Google, where exact match searching is very powerful.

But this is all a burden on the publisher: you've no idea how much it is going to cost, you have no feel for the amount of management time it's going to take.

We advise clients in cases of copyright infringement to set a budget. If you try to handle this reactively it spirals out of control. Instead of saying we've no idea how much it's going to cost, we share the risk with client. We fix a budget, guarantee an annual spend of an agreed amount and work through complaints throughout the year.

You have to ask what is this worth to you? For major image banks, for example, it's not going to be worth a lot. They have substantial enforcement programmes, but their particular issue is how do they manage the cost of taking the difficult perpetrators to court.

It's a question of evaluating the copyright and asking am I'm going to sell more of my content if I can stop this infringement? It's not so much a case of what can I get out of it - the answer to that is probably not a great deal - but of limiting the damage.

Are the remedies for publishers suffering copyright infringements sufficient?
If a publisher in the UK starts to infringe copyright there are pretty powerful remedies: if you prove the loss or find out how much has been gained by breaching copyright you should get an award for that amount.

What advice would you give to individual journalists seeking to protect their copyright online?
Individuals need to be cautious and be aware of the mindset of if you publish, you're giving it away.

They need to think about why they are publishing online before they do so and be aware of the risks.

There are ways of making money out material that's online, but content providers must be satisfied that the returns outweigh the risks.

(Read other articles in Journalism.co.uk online copyright series)

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