Page 106 - Law and the Media

New Media
The E-commerce Directive will have a impact on Internet defamation. Under Article 12,
Internet service providers such as Demon in the Godfrey v Demon Internet Ltd (2000) case
will not be liable for information transmitted on their sites as long as they do not initiate the
transmission, select the recipient or modify the information contained in it. Under Article 15
of the E-commerce Directive they will not be obliged to monitor the information and content
they transmit and store. However, under Article 14 they will be required to remove unlawful
material such as defamatory statements from their sites if it is brought to their attention.
Publishers of online newspapers and magazines do not fall within the provisions.

The situation is different in the United States where no liability is imposed upon Internet
service providers for defamatory material.

4.3 Copyright

4.3.1 Original works

General principles
Any media company publishing in multimedia format or on the Internet needs to ensure that
its copyright is fully protected. Individual authors must also ensure they have protection for
original work. However, complex copyright issues arise where a company or author of an
original multimedia product wishes to protect the labour in the work that has been
created.

There is no one category under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (the ‘CDPA’)
that can provide overall protection for multimedia products. However, it is possible to protect
the various different aspects of a multimedia product such as the text, graphics, images and
audio and video on a web site or a CD-ROM under the different categories provided by the
CDPA.

Registration
Under the CDPA, the owner of copyright does not need to go through any formalities such
as registration in order to protect a copyright work. No copyright notice need appear on a
work. However, for international copyright protection under the Universal Copyright
Convention the formula ©, the name of the copyright owner and date of first publication
must be placed on a work.

Employees and sub-contractors
If employees create an original work for a web site in the course of their employment, the
normal rule is that copyright is owned by the employer in the absence of any agreement to
the contrary.

Anyone working for himself owns the copyright in any work he produces unless he assigns
it to someone else. It is important for freelance journalists to look carefully at any freelance
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