Q. How does copyright apply to online content republishing and sharing?

Sharing and republishing content online is intrinsic to current day education and research activities. Examples of commonly used content-sharing platforms include Facebook, Blogger, Kahoot, SurveyMonkey, PebblePad, YouTube, Weebly, Dropbox, Google Classroom and so many more.

When sharing and republishing content online whether publicly (e.g., ResearchOnline@JCU) or behind password protection (e.g., LearnJCU), it may be tempting to include third-party materials such as music, images, graphics and video clips. However, these are not situations where anything goes. Students, teaching staff and researchers have an obligation to comply with relevant copyright, contract and/or licence conditions. 

Third-party terms and conditions

What are the terms and conditions of the third-party platform you will use to share content? Typically, their terms and conditions require users to grant the platform (and/or parent company) a copyright licence to use the uploaded content (e.g., Blogger content policy). 

Are you the copyright holder?

Considering the above, do you have the right to grant a third-party permission to use the content? The answer is yes if you were the creator of the content. It gets tricky if you were not the creator. For example, you may have paid for a graphic from an online image company, but investigation of that company's licence conditions will show that purchase does not give you the right to grant a third-party platform copyright over the image (e.g. Clipart.com licence agreement).