Copyright and your video.

Your own charity's reports, bids and papers are usually yours to use. For a document someone else published, whether a video needs their permission depends on what it takes from it. A video that shows the document's own pages needs the right to adapt it. A video that redraws its ideas in our own words and pictures does not normally need it.

Ideas are free; their expression is not

Copyright protects the way a work is expressed: its words, its layout, its figures and its images. It does not protect the ideas, facts, methods or findings the work describes. This is the position in UK law and in the international treaties the UK has signed:

The WTO's TRIPS Agreement, Article 9(2): "Copyright protection shall extend to expressions and not to ideas, procedures, methods of operation or mathematical concepts as such."
The WIPO Copyright Treaty, Article 2: "Copyright protection extends to expressions and not to ideas, procedures, methods of operation or mathematical concepts as such."
In the United States, 17 U.S.C. § 102(b): copyright does not "extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery".

The line is not always sharp. Under the UK's Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, section 16(3), copying "any substantial part" of a work infringes, as well as copying the whole. The House of Lords considered when taking ideas from a work amounts to copying a substantial part in Designers Guild v Russell Williams [2000] UKHL 58. So a redrawn video must genuinely redraw: a diagram traced from your document can still copy its expression.

What this means for the two kinds of video

A video that shows your document

Clips of your document's pages, its figures reproduced, or its text quoted at length all copy your document's expression, and a video made from them is an adaptation. It needs one of:

you or your organisation hold the copyright, as a charity usually does for its own reports, bids and papers (check any material in them from partners, funders or photographers);
your publishing agreement allows adaptations, for a document published by someone else;
the publisher has given permission; or
an open licence that allows adaptations and commercial use: the public domain, CC BY, or CC BY-SA, whose share-alike terms then apply to the video.

CC BY-ND does not allow adaptations and CC BY-NC does not allow commercial use, so neither covers a video of this kind. For a document under another licence, such as the Open Government Licence that most UK government publications use, choose "something else" when you order and we will check it before we start.

A redrawn video

A redrawn video copies no text or images from your document. It relays your document's ideas and findings in our own words, with every diagram redrawn and every chart plotted from the numbers your document reports, and it cites your document as typeset text. Because copyright protects how a document is written and drawn, not its ideas or facts, a video of this kind does not normally need the publisher's permission, whatever your document's licence.

Where a short quotation matters, such as a defined term, we keep it to a few words and attribute it. UK law allows fair dealing with a work for quotation, criticism or review, with sufficient acknowledgement (section 30 of the 1988 Act; see also the IPO's exceptions to copyright).

We still ask that you are entitled to share your document with us, because you upload it for us to read.