Introduction

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 5.3.9–16, 5.3.21) 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) and legal deposit of non-print works (see 7.15). 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.