Copyright: information for students

copyright-200When you are making copies at BU, you must comply with copyright law. The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 contains an exemption called ‘Fair Dealing’ which allows individuals to make a single copy of a short extract from a copyrighted work, for the purposes of non-commercial research and private study.

The law also permits copying for the purposes of sitting an exam or submitting an assignment, dissertation or thesis (provided that the material copied is not subsequently published). Therefore, you do not have to seek permission to include third party copyright material in your academic work, as long as it is fully referenced.

You should not carry out unauthorised downloading of software, music or films e.g. by file sharing. This is illegal and penalties can be severe.

Further information on copyright is available on the Library web pages.