Book contents
4 - Publication, exhibition and performance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 June 2018
Summary
Significance and nature
The terms ‘publication’ and ‘published’ need to be approached with care because they are applied to different aspects of copyright law in rather different ways:
• Whether a work has been published or not is a matter that can affect its qualification for copyright protection (see 3.1).
• The act of publication, which is irrevocable, may have consequences for the duration of copyright (so long as publication was authorized by the copyright owner). It also ‘exhausts’ the copyright owner's rights in that particular copy of the work, so that a book may be sold second-hand for instance (see 5.1.3).
• Unauthorized publication of a work, whether previously published or not, is an infringement (see 5.1.3), but perhaps oddly does not result in an unpublished work becoming, for copyright purposes, a published one (see 4.1.9).
• First publication of an unpublished literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work or a film in which copyright has expired creates a new publication right for the publisher (see 8.3). However, if such a work is first published while still in copyright, publication right can never be applied to it.
The definition of publication contained in the 1988 Act as altered by regulations made in 1996 applies to all copyright works, whether they were made under earlier legislation or not. Previous definitions of publication, therefore, have little practical relevance. Besides the issues outlined above, an archivist or records manager needs to be able to distinguish between published and unpublished works because the legal provisions concerning copy - ing by libraries and archives differ between published and unpublished material, which affects how much of a work may be copied, by whom and for what purposes (see 5.4).
One of the quirks of copyright is that a work of architecture commenced on or after 1 August 1989 is published when it is constructed. Any building commenced before that date remains unpublished (but see 2.3.4).
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- Information
- Copyright for Archivists and Records Managers , pp. 99 - 110Publisher: FacetPrint publication year: 2015