Copyright and your video.

Your own pitch is yours to adapt. Whether a video needs anyone else's permission depends on what else is in it: a video that shows third-party images, charts or logos from your document needs the right to adapt them, and a video that redraws your ideas in our own words and pictures does not normally need it.

Ideas are free; their expression is not

Copyright protects the way a work is expressed: its words, its layout, its figures and its images. It does not protect the ideas, facts, methods or findings the work describes. This is the position in UK law and in the international treaties the UK has signed:

The WTO's TRIPS Agreement, Article 9(2): "Copyright protection shall extend to expressions and not to ideas, procedures, methods of operation or mathematical concepts as such."
The WIPO Copyright Treaty, Article 2: "Copyright protection extends to expressions and not to ideas, procedures, methods of operation or mathematical concepts as such."
In the United States, 17 U.S.C. § 102(b): copyright does not "extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery".

The line is not always sharp. Under the UK's Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, section 16(3), copying "any substantial part" of a work infringes, as well as copying the whole. The House of Lords considered when taking ideas from a work amounts to copying a substantial part in Designers Guild v Russell Williams [2000] UKHL 58. So a redrawn video must genuinely redraw: a diagram traced from someone else's report can still copy its expression.

What this means for the two kinds of video

A video that shows the document

Clips of your document's pages or slides, its figures reproduced, or its text quoted at length all copy its expression, and a video made from them is an adaptation. For your own words and designs that is straightforward. For everything else shown on those pages, such as a chart from a market report, a stock photograph or another organisation's logo, it needs one of:

you or your organisation hold the copyright;
your licence for that material allows adaptations (stock image and report licences vary, so check them);
the owner has given permission; or
an open licence that allows adaptations and commercial use: the public domain, CC BY, or CC BY-SA, whose share-alike terms then apply to the video.

CC BY-ND does not allow adaptations and CC BY-NC does not allow commercial use, so neither covers a video of this kind.

A redrawn video

A redrawn video copies no text or images from the document. It relays your ideas and figures in our own words, with every diagram redrawn and every chart plotted from the numbers the document reports, and it cites any third-party source as typeset text. Because copyright protects how something is written and drawn, not the ideas or facts in it, a video of this kind does not normally need anyone else's permission.

Where a short quotation matters, such as a defined term, we keep it to a few words and attribute it. UK law allows fair dealing with a work for quotation, criticism or review, with sufficient acknowledgement (section 30 of the 1988 Act; see also the IPO's exceptions to copyright).

We still ask that you are entitled to share the document with us, because you upload it for us to read.

Names and logos

Naming a customer, a partner or a funder in your pitch is a factual statement; showing their logo is using their trade mark. Only include logos you have permission to show, and tell us if a name must not appear in the video.