AN ANALYTICAL STUDY OF COPYRIGHT PROTECTION TO ACADEMIC RESEARCH ISSUES

Law

In the era of print, the usage of research papers (in the form of journal articles or conference papers) was governed by copyright law alone. Publishers and authors did not try to impose additional restrictions on the use of their works, and if users wished to make more liberal use of them, they would either have to take out a copyright licence such as those provided by the UK Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) or negotiate directly with the rights holder. As we moved into the electronic era, copyright law still protected works in digital media by virtue of them being in ‘fixed form’. However, the electronic era saw a new departure for the distribution of such copyright works: instead of them being sold outright to purchasers in parallel with their print equivalents, publishers began to license access to them instead. The licensing phenomenon has been much discussed and is not the focus of this paper. However, one of the most significant consequences of licensing was that the usage of such licensed works was no longer solely governed by copyright law, but by the terms of the license agreement signed by the subscriber.

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