It is not necessary to approach the copyright holder(s)
if an express or implied licence has been
granted. Often material is made available to the public with an attached copyright notice stating
precisely the ways in which the work may be used without the need to contact the copyright
holder. Such statements are particularly common in Internet sites and are express licences.
Where copyright material has been placed on the Internet
legally, you may be able to argue you
have an implied licence to use the material in certain ways although this is rarely easy to
demonstrate and so is not often successfully relied upon. For information on implied licences,
see
What are implied licences?
Beware: much copyright material has been put on the Internet
without the permission of the
copyright owner, i.e. illegally, and any further use of this, including downloading it, is likely to
be
illegal too. With increasingly sophisticated search engines copyright owners can track their
material.
