Copyright protects intellectual property. This means something you have done or made yourself. You can't copyright an idea until you have actually started work on it and you can show that someone has copied you. If you work for someone else then generally the copyright belongs to your employer unless there is some sort of special agreement. Also any work that I do for my university course is considered property of the university. The general rule is do it yourself and you own it and it will be protected under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
There is a concept called 'fair dealing' in which you can use certain parts of copyrighted material for reviewing purposes or similar uses. Fair dealing is used in the news all the time when they show football highlights, which in most cases is just the goals. In the corner of the screen you will often see something like 'Pictures from Sky Sports'. This comes under fair dealing and in most cases you will have to credit the person that the copyrighted material belongs to, not doing so will give you less protection under the law. If you wanted to show a film you would have more fair dealing protection if you showed someone watching the film in an over the shoulder shot. For reviewing a film or a video game you would be able to show clips of it as long as you were talking over it and you were only showing the clip for critical or reviewing purposes.
During the production of the WINOL news bulletin this week we encountered a copyright problem which we used fair dealing to get around. To introduce our guest Chesney Hawkes on to the show we wanted to show a clip of his only hit, 'The One and Only' so people would know who he was. We used a 5 second clip of the music video and had a caption saying 'Property of EMI records' over the video which I think is enough to be considered as fair dealing.
For copyright free images there a method of licensing called 'Creative Commons' where you can use images that belong to someone else as long as you credit them and link to their website. There may also be other restrictions like no cropping/editing of the image etc. For more information about Creative Commons see this video interview with Esther Wojcicki, chairperson of the board of Creative Commons.
Freedom of Information
The Freedom of Information Act (2000) is a statute which requires all public authorities to publish all their internal documentation on demand and publish a schedule of all the information that they have. If you put in a FOI request then the authority must provide you with the information in a reasonable time with the absolute maximum amount of time being 60 days at which point you can take your request to an information enforcer. The only excuse for not providing information is that it would be too expensive to do so. All national security and military operations information is exempt.
The website whatdotheyknow.com is a massive online database of Freedom of Information requests and you can also make requests from the website. The great MP's expenses story all started with a Freedom of Information request so this proves that FOI requests can be very useful in providing great public interest news stories.
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