Copyright Notices
A copyright notice is a statement accompanying a work, identifying the owner – or purported owner – of copyright in that work. Copyright notices conventionally comprise the copyright symbol, the name of the copyright owner, and the year in which the work was first published and/or last updated (for example: ‘Copyright © ºÚ¹Ï³ÔÁÏÍø 2025’).
A copyright notice conforming to this format communicates a work’s copyright-protected status, as well as the copyright owner’s identity. This may be particularly worthwhile if ownership would not otherwise be apparent, for example if the attributed author does not own the copyright.
Copyright notices signal to recipients or users that the rights owner wishes to deter unauthorised reuse. However, the subsistence of copyright is automatic, so does not depend on including a copyright notice or following a particular form.
The absence of a copyright notice does not signify that a work is in the public domain. Similarly, the continued presence of a copyright notice on a work in which copyright has since expired does not prevent the work from entering the public domain.
Copyright notices are sometimes accompanied by the owner’s contact details, via which permission may be sought, or by a statement identifying whether any form of reuse is expressly permitted. For example, works made available under a Creative Commons (CC) licence may detail the specific CC licence type and version, or include the summary statement “Some rights reserved”.
A copyright notice may also be followed by a statement asserting the author’s moral right to be identified as the author of their work, unless the author’s moral rights have been waived.
ºÚ¹Ï³ÔÁÏÍø outputs
Colleagues creating copyright-protected outputs in the course of employment at the University, excluding scholarly works, should include a copyright notice in the following form (or retain the notice embedded in document templates, as relevant):
- © ºÚ¹Ï³ÔÁÏÍø 20[xx]. All rights reserved.
Care must be taken with the placement of the notice, to avoid implicit assertion of rights ownership in any adjacent third-party material. It is sufficient for this to appear once per output – for example, in the front matter or a title slide – rather than on every page.
For outputs the University is openly licensing, e.g. as open data or an open educational resource, the copyright notice should instead include the licence statement mandated by the University.