What You Should Know About Copyright
Please note that this section contains guidelines on how to avoid infringement of copyright but it should not be taken as qualified legal advice. If you are unsure whether you are likely to infringe another individual's copyright, you should contact the corporate policy unit for advice before publishing.
Under UK law copyright material sent over the Internet or stored on web servers will generally be protected in the same way as material in other media. Anyone wishing to put copyright material on the Internet, or distribute or download material that others have placed on the Internet, should ensure that they have the permission of the owners of rights in the material.
So, while it's possible to copy images or documents from the Internet, it doesn't necessarily follow that it is legal to do so. You should never reproduce another person's work - be it an image, document or piece of music - without first obtaining that person's permission. You can link to page or document that is already on the web (as long as the owner of the page doesn't specifically forbid the creation of links) but you must not pass off third party material as your own work, or as part of your own site (by using frames, for example).
Copyright can equally apply to material that you may have bought and paid for. For example, you may buy a book and be the owner of the book but you do not own the copyright in the literary work within the book and so are not at liberty to reproduce sections of it at will.
Further information on copyright can be found on a web site maintained by the UK Intellectual Property Office.
