Quick Guide to Copyright

In your teaching, you probably confront questions about how to share legitimately with your students articles, video,music, images, and other intellectual property created by others. Sorting out what you can or can't do is often confusing. Very often, you can use material without special permission, and without paying a copyright fee.

Keep It simple: Link When Possible

The Yale University Library purchases large amounts of electronic journals and books. The Yale ClassesV2 site is restricted to the Yale community. If you create a page in ClassesV2, you may always create a link for your students to:

• Any digital material on the Yale University Library site (e.g., any journal found on http://www.library.yale.edu/ejournals.) The permitted uses of digital resources purchased by the Library are governed by the licenses signed by the Library and the vendor of the resource. These licenses always permit linking to material..
• Any material freely available on the Web (e.g., articles in repositories such as in arXiv)
• If you can't find a digital copy of the material you need, contact [staff in e-collections] to request they purchase the material if available.

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.

Public Domain Works Can Always Be Copied

There may be times when you can't find a digital copy of the desired material. If work is in the public domain, you can make a copy and make it available to students. Works in the public domain are not protected by copyright, so you can use them freely. Examples include:

• Under US law all books 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.

Material not in the Public Domain and Fair Use

To ensure a balance of the rights of copyright owners and the public interest, the law allows you to use copyrighted works without permission — regardless of medium — when evaluation of the circumstances suggests the use is fair. This "fair use" provision of copyright law doesn’t provide hard and fast rules to tell you whether a use qualifies as fair. Instead, the unique facts regarding a use lead you to a reasoned conclusion. Your evaluation should weigh four factors:

1. Purpose and character: If your use is for teaching at a nonprofit educational institution, this is a factor favoring fair use.The scale tips further in favor of fair use if access is restricted to your students.
2. Nature of copyrighted work: Is the work factbased, published, or out-of-print? These factors weigh in favor of fair use.
3. Amount used: Using a small portion of a whole work would weigh toward fairness. But sometimes it may be fair to use an entire work (such as an image) if it is needed for your instructional purpose.
4. Market effect: A use is more likely to be fair if it does not harm the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.But if it does, this could weigh more heavily against fair use than the other factors.

Consider each of these factors, but all of them do not have to be favorable to make your use a fair one.When the factors in the aggregate weigh toward fairness, your use is better justified.When the factors tip the scales in the other direction, your need to obtain permission from the copyright holder increases. Don’t worry that the answer isn’t crystal clear. Just decide whether the factors weigh enough toward fairness so that you are comfortable not seeking permission. Some suggest reliance on the “golden rule” — if you were the copyright holder,would you see the use as fair and not expect to be asked for permission?

Examples of Fair Use

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 above — here are a few examples of uses that are generally regarded as fair:

• copying reasonable portions of longer works for your class, such as a chapter from a book;
• copying a timely article (or one you’ve recently discovered that is relevant for your class) and 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.

Displaying or Performing Works in Your Class

Copyright law makes special provision for displaying images, playing motion pictures, sound recordings, or performing works in classes.

Face-to-face teaching. You may display or perform a work in your clas without obtaining permission when your use is

• for instructional purposes;
• in face-to-face teaching; and
• at a nonprofit educational institution such as Yale University.

If you don't meet all three of these criteria, consider whether what you have in mind is a fair use.

Distance education. Although a specific copyright exemption known as the TEACH Act may apply, its rigorous requirements have prompted most instructors to rely primarily on fair use to display or perform works in distance education (e.g., online or over cable TV). To evaluate the fair use option, weigh the four factors described above. If you judge the use to be fair, you may use the work in your class.

In all cases, the copy of the work that is displayed or performed must have been lawfully made. That means, for example, you can display a video borrowed from the Yale University Library Collection.

Common Questions

Question: Can I show a movie in class that I’ve rented from my home movie rental provider?
Yes, providing the movie is shown for educational purposes and such an educational use is not
prohibited by the license agreement you signed with the rental provider.

Question: I’ve used an article as a standard reading in the past and my students have paid to include it in their course packs. But recently theYale Library has licensed a database that includes the article. Does that change things?
Yes. Instead of including the article in the course pack, now you can simply link to it in your ClassesV2 site and encourage students to use it online.

Question: What about articles that aren’t licensed by the Yale University Library — how do I share them with my students?
Here are several options:

• If the article is available online via open access, share a link to it.
• If a Creative Commons notice appears on the article, you may share the work with your students.
• If the article is in the public domain, you’re free to share it.
• Consider whether use of the work is a fair use.
• Ask the library about putting the article on reserve.
• Ask the library to consider purchasing an online subscription.

The information has been adapted from Know Your Copy Rights, written by the American Research Library Association and made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-
Non-commercial 2.5 License.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has carefully vetted the information in this brochure to ensure its accuracy and conformity with well-accepted practices under US law.However, ARL makes no warranty whatsoever in connection with the information and disclaims liability for damages resulting from its use. No legal services are provided or intended to be provided.