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How digital copyright works
This document was written, and licensed for publication by Naomi Korn Consultancy for the Collections Trust.
Digital copyright protects digital material that satisfies the same copyright qualification criteria as are applied to print. It therefore protects works that have originality and/or show judgement and skill. Please refer to the Collections Trust's Copyright Essentials factsheet for more information on the relevance of copyright to original works.
Copyright may exist both in the work to be reproduced and in the digital reproduction itself. Both of these may qualify independently as artistic works and it is through that qualification that they would both be in copyright. This dual copyright situation is only avoidable if a new work is 'born digital' rather than taken from any pre-existing work in another media, or if it is exclusively created from material for which you are the only copyright holder.
In most cases, digital copyright will last for the duration period of the material's print equivalent. In the case of artistic works, this would be the lifetime of the creator plus seventy years, until the end of the calendar year in which they died.
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