Copyright confusion

Intellectual property law is a thorny area. This is particularly so when it is combined with modern audio and video technology, which make it easy to collect enough trademark violations on a single laptop to exceed the budget of a small country in legal fines.

If, like me, you've had the joy of explaining to users why they can no longer play on YouTube, you'll know how little the average employee knows about the finer points of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act and its partners in law.

Not that I'm an expert by any means; the law is a complex one and full of peculiarities. For example, it's permitted to copy a printed article for "personal research", but not to record a documentary for the same purpose. Online documents might be "documents" in copyright terms, or they might be "databases", which receive slightly different treatment.