The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 is the UK law that protects intellectual property — creative work and inventions that the law treats as belonging to the person who made them. It does this through three separate protections: copyright, design protection and patents. Its purpose is to stop protected work being copied, used or sold without the owner's permission, so that creators stay in control of their work and can earn from it.

Actions the Act prohibits

• Copying protected work without permission — making a duplicate of all or part of it.
• Distributing or selling copies without permission. Copying and distributing work without permission is called piracy.
• Sharing protected work online without permission, such as posting a full copy of a paid-for digital magazine on a public forum where anyone can read it.
• Adapting the work without permission — rewriting it, altering it, or building a new version from it.
• Using protected work inside another work without permission, for example copying a long section of a book into a guide that you sell.
• Installing software on more computers than its licence allows. A licence usually covers a set number of machines, so adding it to extra machines breaks the agreement even though you paid for a copy.

Worked example: a shop buys one cross-stitch pattern from a designer, then prints that pattern onto 150 canvas bags to sell. Each bag carries a copy of the pattern, so the shop has copied the work and sold those copies as part of another product, all without permission. Paying for a single copy does not give the shop the right to do either of those things, so the designer can take legal action.