Hi Sir, I got problem with my websites here. I've almost done with my website which is about "Traditional Food in Brunei". I got all the recipes from books, and internet website and i just found out that all the recipes cannot be copyright. It says:

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without any prior written permission of the copyright owner.

So what am i going to do?? Change another topic???

No. Definitely not!

I'm not a lawyer, but my basic understanding is that copyright is a business thing, designed to prevent people making money out of someone else's work without giving them a royalty. If you were producing a site for commercial gain, and you used somebody else's copyright material, they would have a legal case for sueing you for a share of any money you made out of their work.

Since you are (i presume) not trying to sell the information on your site, no-one is going to try and sue you.

If, on the other hand, you or (as in the case of a paper book, your publisher) do intend to sell your work, then the ordinary thing is to write to the copyright holder asking for permission to reproduce their information in your product. I had to do this for all the pictures in my featherstars book that i copied from other sources. In every case they gave permission and didnt ask for any money, which is normal practice in scientific literature.

Again, as you are not doing this, and - especially - as you are a student writing only for your own learning (and a few marks), you needn't bother to ask permission. They are not going to complain - but if they did, i would offer to give them some marks too as their royalty!

So, as a student writing not for profit, you don't have to worry about copyright.

But you do have to be careful to mention where you got the information you include. Otherwise, you could be accused of plagiarism (cheating by pretending you wrote something whereas in fact you copied it from someone else).

The simplest way to do this is to put whatever you copy in quote marks, and underneath say where it came from. Like this:

"Washington,DC — The rate that digital retailers like Apple’s iTunes must pay
songwriters and music publishers will stay the same under a new
decision handed down by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB),
which rejected the publishers’ petition for a 66% rate hike. The
decision to freeze royalty rates at $0.09 a song came after revelations
this week that Apple had threatened to shutter its iTunes store last
year if rates rose and the business became unprofitable."
- http://www.copyright.com/ccc/viewPage.do?pageCode=cr100-n

Or this:

"If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilisation, is: 'Have they discovered evolution yet?'"
- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, 1989