What are the rights issues arising from tagging, reviewing, rating & favouriting?
Tagging, reviewing, rating and favouriting are all terms used to describe different types of methods used to highlight, refer to, flag, sort, order or rate content that pre-exists on the web. The likely end result of any of these will be some kind of user generated content. This content, where it consists of single words, will not be protected by copyright. Where there are full sentences/paragraphs (which may occur with reviewing) then copyright may subsist in the text. Copyright is unlikely to subsist in the typographic arrangement (if it subsists in the web page at all – see other FAQs) as the content would only make up a small part of the whole of the site. Database rights are unlikely to subsist in the collection as the investment is not of the right kind. Thus permission will seldom be needed to re-use this content. However, and as many users may be unaware of the underlying law and thus hesitant to re-use this content, a statement in the Terms and Conditions of Service that it ma
