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The concept of user rights in copyright law has clear affinities with the concept of copyright scope. The scope of an author’s entitlement over her work is lessened in proportion to the extent to which we assert that users, too, have rights. Yet user rights have profound implications not only with regard to copyright scope but also with regard to copyright subject matter. User rights implicate not only the scope of an author’s entitlement, but also the very nature of her work. Integrating user rights into copyright jurisprudence requires that a work of authorship be conceived not as an intangible commodity or metaphysical chattel, but as an act of speech performed by its author. The proposition that user rights are integral to copyright law makes sense only if we regard authors as speakers, and works of authorship as acts of communication.

The purpose of this monograph is to examine the main elements of the Copyright Designs & Patents Act 1988 which received the Royal Assent on the 15th November 1988. The Act provided for a major overhaul of the law on copyright and on registered designs, as well as certain adjustments to patent and trademark law and two major new regimes on performers' rights and design rights. While this is a major domestic reform the law is unlikely to remain unaltered for long because of the move towards a single market within the E.E.C. by 1992. This will lead to the introduction of harmonised regimes on the various elements of intellectual property law such as copyright and industrial design which will no doubt require some readjustment to U.K. domestic law. Recently the E.E.C. Commission published a Green Paper on “Copyright and the Challenge of Technology” which suggests solutions to some questions such as the vexed problem of illegal home taping which are different to those adopted by the U.K. in the new Act. [On 21/12/88 a draft directive on Copyright & Computer Software which proposes a harmonised regime for the protection of computer programs and related matters was published]. It also has to be borne in mind that while Article 222 of the Treaty of Rome states that the treaty does not affect the existence of national intellectual property right regimes the “exercise” of these national rights may be found to infringe the provisions of the Treaty on free movement of goods (Arts. 30–36) or on competition law (Arts. 85–86).

This paper is the fifth in a series of studies emanating from the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)‐funded RoMEO Project (rights metadata for open‐archiving). The paper reports the results of two surveys of OAI data providers (DPs) and service providers (SPs) with regards to the rights issues they face. It finds that very few DPs have rights agreements with depositing authors and that there is no standard approach to the creation of rights metadata. The paper considers the rights protection afforded individual and collections of metadata records under UK law and contrasts this with DPs' and SPs' views on the rights status of metadata and how they wish to protect it. The majority of DPs and SPs believe that a standard way of describing both the rights status of documents and of metadata would be useful.

This is the first of a series of studies emanating from the UK JISC‐funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open‐archiving) which investigated the IPR issues relating to academic author self‐archiving of research papers. It considers the claims for copyright ownership in research papers by universities, academics, and publishers by drawing on the literature, a survey of 542 academic authors and an analysis of 80 journal publisher copyright transfer agreements. The paper concludes that self‐archiving is not best supported by copyright transfer to publishers. It recommends that universities assert their interest in copyright ownership in the long term, that academics retain rights in the short term, and that publishers consider new ways of protecting the value they add through journal publishing.

A great artist creates a mural which, bearing his name, eventually reaches the hands of a purchaser who objects to the nude figures that the creator had seen fit to incorporate into his tableau. The purchaser, therefore, employs another artist to drape the figures. In a now famous decree the German Supreme Court, in 1912, held that the transferee of the mural in a case involving these facts, could not have changed it to suit his individual preferences.

This paper aims to give a snapshot of the copyright and neighboring rights law of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), illustrating the provisions governing the law. It seeks to frame UAE copyright provisions within the context of the principles of copyright and the structure of international copyright protection.

The article begins with an overview of copyright laws. It highlights the central issues of concern to education, librarianship, and scholarship, depicting the complexity that the digital era has brought on copyright doctrines. It then explains the exclusive rights granted under the law, showing its orientation toward the civil law tradition with its emphasis on moral rights.

The author observes that a key effort to making practical sense of copyright in this region entails educating key communities, and emphasizing the importance of copyright limitations and exceptions pertaining to educational institutions and libraries. He advocates for applying copyright to the advantage of academic and research communities, and offers strategies strengthening the right of use in favor of these communities. Understanding the concepts and principles of copyright will make these communities proponents of sound copyright policies that will safeguard the promotion of learning and the right of public access, while still protecting intellectual property rights.

There has not been any discussion in the library literature on copyright in the UAE and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. Therefore, this case study of the UAE copyright and neighboring rights law aims to provoke such discussion. It should be useful to the whole library community, and particularly those in the UAE and other GCC countries.

This paper argues that the revolution in intellectual property rights is not forward-looking, but backward looking, and that it is not consonant with the purposes of the patent and copyright clause. It is animated by the theory of common law copyright, which deliberately reconceptualizes social relations in order to recast them as property, and which has been with us for centuries. This paper investigates the “mythology of common law copyright,” showing how this reconceptualization has worked both historically and in the present day to push the law in a direction that is ostensibly author-centered, but is actually focused on the rights of intermediaries.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the legal issues of simultaneous Internet transmission of broadcasting programs of the Open University of Japan (OUJ) and to take legal measures to promote the mutual utilization of open university courses in Japan, the UK, China and Korea.

The author examines the legal relationship regarding Internet simultaneous distribution of broadcast courses at the OUJ. The author then considers the legal relationship between the UK, China and South Korea regarding the simultaneous transmission of broadcast courses over the internet. Based on that consideration, this paper clarifies legal measures to promote its utilization.

Internet transmission of broadcasting courses will be webcasting. Arguably, it can be assumed to be streaming and on-demand, albeit controversial. Webcasting will be publicly transmitted, but there is only an on-demand provision for Internet transmission. As webcasting is streaming and on-demand, it involves reproduction of broadcasting courses. Therefore, webcasting needs to provide streaming provision for public transmission rights and associate them with reproduction right.

The originality of this paper lies in clarifying the legal response of the object, subject and rights of webcasting from the perspective of the OUJ, in order to dispel legal problems that may arise in the future against this unexplored phenomenon. Additionally, this paper is valuable in that it presents legal consistency from the point of view of the comparative laws of Japan, the UK, China and South Korea, based on an examination of the legal response in Japan.

The purpose of this paper is to consider how the open access policy environment has developed since the Rights Metadata for Open Archiving Project’s call in 2003 for universities and academics to assert joint copyright ownership of scholarly works and investigate whether UK universities are moving towards a joint copyright ownership.

The paper analyses 81 UK university copyright policies to understand what proportion make a claim over: IP ownership of all outputs; the copyright in scholarly works; re-using scholarly works in specific ways; and approaches to moral rights. Results are cross-tabulated by policy age and mission group.

Universities have not asserted their interest in scholarly works through joint ownership, leaving research funders and publishers to set open access policy. The paper finds an increased proportion of universities assert a generic claim to all IP (87 per cent) relative to earlier studies. In total, 74 per cent of policies relinquished rights in scholarly works in favour of academic staff; 20 per cent of policies share ownership of scholarly works through licensing; 28 per cent of policies assert the right to re-use scholarly works in some way; and 32 per cent of policies seek to protect moral rights. Policies that “share” ownership of scholarly works are more recent. The UK Scholarly Communication Licence (UK-SCL) should have an impact on this area. The reliance on individual academics to enforce a copyright policy or not to opt-out of the UK-SCL could be problematic. The paper concludes that open access may still be best served by joint ownership of scholarly works.

This the first large-scale analysis of UK university policy positions towards scholarly works. The paper discovers for the first time a move towards “shared” ownership of scholarly works in copyright policies.

This column looks at which rights matter, how to retain them, and which journal publishers already cooperate.

It uses the requirements of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access, and examines the Creative Commons licences, the SPARC addendum, the project RoMEO list publishers' copyright policies, and the Emerald Journal Article Record form.

If retaining rights to works in order to provide open access is a key part of the solution to the crisis in scholarly publishing, then significant progress has taken place.

It remains to be seen whether having authors retain the right to provide open access will, over time, bring down journal costs. Enough publishers have cooperated that an opportunity now exists for repositories to begin to show what they can (or cannot) accomplish.

It remains to be seen whether having authors retain the right to provide open access will, over time, bring down journal costs.