Know Your Copy Rights: Using works in your teaching: Home

In many cases, you can eliminate the need for permission or fee by simply giving your students a link to the work instead of making copies of it. For example:

• Your library already may have paid for a subscription license that entitles you and your students to online access. Check your library’s Web site to see if the work you wish to use is available there without charge.
• Even if your library hasn’t purchased access, the work may be available for free on a legitimate Web site, such as your institutional repository or another online open archive, the author’s homepage, or an open access journal. Most sites allow students to print a copy for personal use.
• If your library has not licensed access and you can’t link to the work for free, contact the library’s electronic reserves department about whether they can arrange access for your students.

Consider retaining the rights you need to place your own work in an open archive and share it with your students. The SPARC Author Addendum is one means of securing these rights.

If linking isn’t the answer, there’s still hope. Here are several common situations in which you are free to make copies for your students or use works in the classroom without permission or fee:

Uses permitted by license

Use of electronic resources today is commonly governed, not just by copyright, but also by licenses between owners and users. Your use rights can differ from license to license. Commonly  a publisher’s or aggregator’s license with a research library will allow faculty and their students to:

• Print a reasonable amount of a work.
• Share it with other authorized users covered by the license (typically, all faculty and enrolled students are authorized users).

With the potential for creators to offer their works directly to users on the Web, use of Creative Commons licenses is growing (www.creative commons.org). Using a Creative Commons notice, creators specify the rights conveyed to users — such as to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, provided attribution is given.

Fair uses

When the circumstances might reasonably be judged as fair, you may use copyrighted works in your teaching without obtaining permission. US law lists four fair use factors — described in the shaded area at right — that will help you evaluate whether your use is permitted. Here are a few examples of uses that are generally regarded as fair:

• copying reasonable portions of longer works for your class;
• copying a timely article (or one you’ve recently discovered that is relevant for your class) when it’s unreasonable to expect a sufficiently rapid reply to a request for permission; and
• copying a graphic or an image from a work to display in your lectures.

Public domain

Works in the public domain are not protected by copyright, so you can use them freely. Here are examples of public domain works:

• Under US law, copyright expires 70 years after the death of the author. At that point, works automatically enter the public domain. As a practical matter, all works published in the US before 1923 are now in the public domain.
• Works by the US Government or created by its employees as part of their job are in the public domain. Note, however, that this does not apply to most works by federal grant recipients or contractors or to works of most other governments, including state and local governments.

Check with your library to explore whether your use rights have already been paid for or whether there are alternatives to paying a fee.