Great against street crime. Apparently less so in copyright matters.

I was doing some research on various topics a while ago, and stumbled across a rather disturbing find. On a site run for and by police officers (specifically, the Special Constabulary - a voluntary police force, whose members have full police powers, including the power of arrest), there's a forum called 'news', where its members post news stories related to policing in the UK.

The interesting case from the perspective of copyright law is that the forum members routinely break the law by infringing the copyrights of the news organisations publishing the news stories.

Examples

All the below posts were posted not by 'ordinary' forum users, but by users who have a badge marking them out as 'serving police officers'. To get that badge, you apparently have to identify yourself to the forum moderators as a bona fide UK serving police officer.

The below are only the articles posted by serving police officers (there were also a lot of ones posted by people who haven't identified themselves as such), between June 1 and June 12th of 2011.

But, isn't this fair use?

In short: no.

In long: In order to fall under fair use under UK copyright law, as far as I understand it, it has to be "Research and private study" (not applicable here), "Instruction or examination" (again, not applicable), "Criticism or review" (This would be the most likely contender in this case, but most of the posts are merely copying the original source, with no in-depth criticism, review, or analysis of the original piece), or "News reporting" (not applicable, as the news is already reported by the original source - copying it wholesale is not 'reporting'), or "Incidental inclusion" (not applicable).

Embarrassing.

In other words, each of the above posts break UK copyright law. Doubly embarrassing, then, that the lawbreakers in question are all police officers.

It would appear that the discussion of copyright has already happened on the Police Specials forum back in January of 2010, where one poster writes: "Given the nature of the site, I think we need to be quite careful about breaking the law" and "A better solution would be if we wrote a synopsis (or copied the first 10-20 words or so) and then linked to the original source - that way, there's no risk of any issues.".

In the long discussion that follows, it doesn't appear that the police themselves (or, at least, the small sub-section of police that post to this particular forum) understand how copyright works, or how it is meant to protect publishers, authors, and artists.

I suppose that if even a forum full of police officers doesn't grasp the basics of copyright, it's hardly a surprise that I'm finding copyright infringements on my own articles left, right, and center. Not surprising. Just a little depressing.

The pictures associated with this post are for illustration only, and were purchased from iStockphoto.

Police fail: Copyright? What is that?

Examples

But, isn't this fair use?

Embarrassing.

Further Reading