As mentioned on the Copyright Exceptions page, Irish copyright law grants exemptions that allow limited use of copyrighted material by students, teachers and other education staff under certain conditions. In addition to this, there is a licence that permits the use of certain copyrighted material for educational purposes, above and beyond the exceptions granted by law. The licence itself contains conditions and restrictions.
The Irish Copyright Licencing Agency (ICLA) is a licensing body as defined by the 2000 Copyright Act, which licences the use of print and digital works to educational establishments and other organisations. The licence allows for copying, subject to some restrictions, from Irish and overseas publications. The ICLA is a not-for-profit organisation and the money generated by licences is distributed to authors and other creators of copyrighted content.
There is a licence for further education, which allows you to use materials from the content listed below in lectures without having to seek permission:
The licence permits copying of:
Note that these only apply to items owned by your institution directly or is accessible through an institutional subscription.
It does not include:
This doesn't mean that you can't copy them - remember fair dealing? - just that the licence doesn't cover these works; you can't go ahead and copy sheet music and then say that the ICLA licence lets you do this - it doesn't.
Quoting the licence, "Licensed Copies may be supplied to Distance Learners wherever they are located and Distance Learners may make a copy of a Licensed Copy in order to view it at a more convenient time." No distinction is made between soft and hard copies of material.
Unless there are special circumstances - such as being created in the course of your job - you are the copyright holder of your own work. This is enshrined in the Copyright Act (see sections 21-23). Copyright is applied automatically - you don't have to do anything to register it. To state and prove copyright, you should keep a hard copy of your work, and state on it that you are asserting your ownership rights. Do this by including a copyright statement. This has three parts:
An optional fourth element is the inclusion of a statement of rights, which normally comes in three forms:
Putting all four elements together, you'd have something like:
The copyright statement should be displayed in such a way to make users aware that that your work is copyrighted. In a book or ebook, the copyright statement should be on a page at the front of the book. For a webpage, you should have a copyright statement at the bottom of every page. YouTube - and other - videos should have a copyright notice in the video description or video credits. Photos and images should have a watermark or have a copyright statement in their description.
If you're using "Some rights reserved", you should clearly indicate what may be done with your work. Again, consider an open licence such as a Creative Commons licence, if you're happy to waive some rights.
Note that even if you do make your work available on the web with a clearly worded copyright statement, people will still copy your work - it's simply human nature. If you do want to protect your work, do not upload it to the web.
