Copyright Aid

I am planning an online magazine for a niche business subject.

The magazine will include interviews with people who will be mainly low-profile but inspirational role models for the intended readership.

Some well-known newspapers and online resources have already interviewed many of those role models over several years and published profile pieces, Q&A style interviews and so on, which is how I became aware of the role models.

If I re-interview a role model for my own magazine do I in any way infringe the copyright of the news organisation or website that already interviewed the person?

I'm not referring to using the original interview. I hope to fully re-interview the interviewees myself, creating original content.

Clearly, I could not - nor would I wish to - deliberately copy any part of what had already been published. However, to what extent do the existing publishers have the copyright or other rights over the interview material which has already been published?

For example, if an article in a newspaper provides the name, age, location and business of an interviewee, and some basic facts about their business and "journey", can I use that information to begin my own article, or are such basic research facts already the copyright of the researcher or publication that originally located the interviewee?

What if the interviewee chooses to repeat to me exactly what they told the earlier interviewers?

Similarly, the initial interviewer would probably have asked some standard questions, such as "Tell me how you started in this business". "What is your greatest challenge for next year?" Are such questions themselves subject to copyright? If such questions can only have one possible answer, for example, "My secret sauce, which I'm revealing to you for the first time". How can that be handled correctly?

Hi mycopyright and welcome to the forum,

Copyright usually attaches to any original written, artistic, musical or dramatic work, and where it does, the first owner of that copyright is the author, artist, composer or dramatist respectively. There is no copyright in facts alone or in ideas. What counts is the expression of the ideas. So a person's name, occupation, age, place of birth, or a date from history on which a certain event occurred, or what the weather was like yesterday, are all examples of things which wouldn't attract copyright because they are facts.

Thus you can see that re-interviewing someone will not infringe any previous interview that person may have done. If you ask a simple question, such as 'how did you get started in the [x] business?' that is not original beacuse it's been said and written thousands of times in many different contexts. Equally, if the interviewee answers using exactly the same words and phrases as on a previous occasion, he is the author of his own words and so he will not be infringing his own earlier speech. Even a few introductory remarks about the person are unlikely to be infringing as you will probably just be reciting a series of facts about the person. You can even say something which is a direct quote of an earlier article or interview, provided that you give a credit to the source of the quote: "Today we are talking to Elon Musk the man that Time magazine once described as the 'most disruptive and ambitious entrepreneur of his generation.'.." The important thing to note about quoting another source is not to overdo it, and only take just enough words to make your point and no more.

I have very little doubt that many articles which are written about well-known personalities, which are not in themselves interviews, are entirely constructed from previous articles and interviews, and introduce virtually no new information about the person. If you asked an AI program like ChatGPT to write an article about your chosen role model, that is exactly how the software would go about the process, and I have no doubt that many magazine (both print media and online) publishers have noted that.

Hi Andy,

Thanks very much for your welcome, and tremendously helpful and prompt reply. It's fantastic to have found this forum.