Copyright when working online
Introduction
Prepared by the OU’s Intellectual Property (IP) Department
This section offers guidance to you when working online within any of the OU’s online environments. This may be when using a website for your course of study, or any of the OU’s collaborative or personal online tools. The website allocated to your course of study is designed to allow you (via a username and password) to access study materials, participate in online collaboration, upload content for your own study purposes and share content and discussion topics with other students following the same course of study. Your tutor and perhaps others closely involved with the course of study may also upload relevant content for you to access. However any content you upload online, and make available to others (even to other students on the same course of study) must belong wholly to you and not infringe any third party rights, including copyright.
You must not upload any content (unless very small) that does not belong to you or for which you do not have permission. For example, you may be able to use up to 400 continuous words from a large book, but you must be aware that this is a qualitative as well as a quantitative decision (i.e. if you quoted a sentence from a murder mystery which revealed the murderer, this would be considered to be a substantial part of the work). It is also important that you do check terms and conditions on websites where you have copied content; they may allow use of extracts without permission, but under certain licence terms (see Creative commons licensing section). Uploading or copying content without the copyright owners’ permission may be an infringement of copyright, which is a disciplinary offence under the OU Computing code of conduct and other OU student regulations. It may also be a civil and/or criminal offence for which you may be liable.
In order to help you work online within the OU’s regulations and within the law concerning copyright whilst studying with the OU, please read the following guidelines.