Copyright and your film.

Whether a film needs the publisher's permission depends on what it takes from the paper. A film that shows the paper's own pages needs the right to adapt it. A film that redraws the paper's ideas in our own words and pictures does not normally need it.

Ideas are free; their expression is not

Copyright protects the way a work is expressed: its words, its layout, its figures and its images. It does not protect the ideas, facts, methods or findings the work describes. This is the position in UK law and in the international treaties the UK has signed:

The WTO's TRIPS Agreement, Article 9(2): "Copyright protection shall extend to expressions and not to ideas, procedures, methods of operation or mathematical concepts as such."
The WIPO Copyright Treaty, Article 2: "Copyright protection extends to expressions and not to ideas, procedures, methods of operation or mathematical concepts as such."
In the United States, 17 U.S.C. § 102(b): copyright does not "extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery".

The line is not always sharp. Under the UK's Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, section 16(3), copying "any substantial part" of a work infringes, as well as copying the whole. The House of Lords considered when taking ideas from a work amounts to copying a substantial part in Designers Guild v Russell Williams [2000] UKHL 58. So a redrawn film must genuinely redraw: a diagram traced from the paper can still copy its expression.

What this means for the two kinds of film

A film that shows the paper

Clips of the paper's pages, its figures reproduced, or its text quoted at length all copy the paper's expression, and a film made from them is an adaptation. It needs one of:

you or your organisation hold the copyright;
your publishing agreement allows adaptations (most authors assign copyright to their publisher, so check it, or look up its policy on Open Policy Finder);
the publisher has given permission; or
an open licence that allows adaptations and commercial use: the public domain, CC BY, or CC BY-SA, whose share-alike terms then apply to the film.

CC BY-ND does not allow adaptations and CC BY-NC does not allow commercial use, so neither covers a film of this kind.

A redrawn film

A redrawn film copies no text or images from the paper. It relays the paper's ideas and findings in our own words, with every diagram redrawn and every chart plotted from the numbers the paper reports, and it cites the paper as typeset text. Because copyright protects how a paper is written and drawn, not its ideas or facts, a film of this kind does not normally need the publisher's permission, whatever the paper's licence.

Where a short quotation matters, such as a defined term, we keep it to a few words and attribute it. UK law allows fair dealing with a work for quotation, criticism or review, with sufficient acknowledgement (section 30 of the 1988 Act; see also the IPO's exceptions to copyright).

We still ask that you are entitled to share the paper with us, because you upload it for us to read.