Copyright

Research data is usually not protected by copyright but may contain copyrighted materials!

A copyright means that the author is entitled to determine the use of the work. No public copies may generally be made of works protected by copyright.

Research data are protected by copyrights if they include "original works of authorship" or constitute a database. 

Copyrights protect works that surpass the threshold of originality. In practice, the threshold is low: the work should be independent (i.e. not a copy of an existing work) and sufficiently original. A product is sufficiently original if someone else would probably not create a similar work. Copyright protection does not require registration or publishing, and the quality of the work and the amount of labour used are not significant.  In other words, bottom-drawer poems, children’s drawings, choreographies, computer games or films, among others, can be copyrighted.   Copyrights are valid for a fixed period, usually during the author’s lifetime and 70 years after the author’s death. 

Research data are not copyrighted, that is, you do not hold copyright to the raw data you collect (e.g. interview data).  If you instead produce, for instance, a database based on your materials, the database may be given copyright-type legal protection.  

Are you doing research on copyrighted material?

Your research data may involve copyrights or related rights if you do research on, for example, photos, artworks, drawings, poems, choreographies, games, songs or videos.   

Theses are public documents. Citation is one way to publish a copyrighted part of research data, but there are restrictions in citing.  In general, for example, you can publish an image as an image citation in your thesis if the image has a connection to the text and if it is justified to publish the image to support the conclusions presented in the text.  

If you collect a set of data based on newspaper articles or published photos, prepare a separate document where you list their source information (i.e. bibliographic information: author, time of publication, etc.). (Source: DMP Tuuli, the Finnish Social Science Data Archive guidelines)

If you collect copyrighted material directly from your research participants (e.g. diary notes, photos), make a separate agreement on copyrights. The agreement can say e.g. who owns the copyright, how is the data used in the research project, can direct quotations be used, should be person's name be included (remember to consider privacy!). (Source: DMP Tuuli, the Finnish Social Science Data Archive guidelines)

Copyright protects the form of expression: it does not protect the piece of information, idea, topic, plot or research result as such. The content of a work can thus be freely reported in one’s own words in another work or presentation. The work is then used as a source.  https://www.sanasto.fi/sitaatti/  

Watch a video about copyright in research data.

Copyright websites used as sources:  

• Tekijänoikeus.fi 
• Kopiosto 
• Sanasto 
• Kuvasto 
• Teosto