Copyright

Copyright is a tricky topic, even for experts. In most cases, there are no obvious right or wrong choices when dealing with copyright issues – copyright law is full of gray areas.

Key points regarding copyright law in the United States:

Fair Use Tool from University of Minnesota Libraries: Thinking Through Fair Use

United States Copyright Office: Fair Use

Stanford University Libraries: Measuring Fair Use: The Four Factors

Copyright Clearance Center: Copyright Basics: Fair Use

Columbia University Libraries/Information Services Copyright Advisory Office: Fair Use

Students in the pursuit of scholarship have an easier time justifying that an activity falls under the Fair Use doctrine because they are engaged in an educational activity. Still, the amount of material copied/scanned/distributed/posted and the number of copies made can make a big difference.

For example, one of the following activities probably falls under fair use and two probably do not:

In the second and third scenarios, the student is reproducing the entire work (as opposed to a portion of the work) and this causes the rightful copyright holders to lose money because the student or their classmates now will not purchase their own copies of the textbook. Most courts of law would not consider this "fair".

There is no definitive answer to this. A generally practiced rule of thumb is no more than ten percent from a single work. Copying less than ten percent of a work for a student's own personal use is probably fair use, unless the copied text is the "heart of the work".

Here's another example. One of these activities probably falls under fair use and one probably does not:

In the first scenario, the student distributes the article electronically to a large number of people. The student has taken one copy and reproduced it at least fifty times (i.e. made fifty copies, one for each person who received the email). This is probably not fair use. Additionally, digital copies are often judged more severely than paper copies because they are so much easier to share quickly and in large numbers.

*Understand that you as students are personally liable for any copyright infringment in which you engage. It is your responsibility to understand how your actions fit into copyright law. The library staff and your instructors can recommend resources for doing so (such as those listed in the section above), but we cannot make fair use judgements for you.*

Students found engaging in inappropriate use of copyrighted materials will be referred to the Professional Misconduct Committee for disciplinary action.

The University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences maintains an Annual Copyright License from the Copyright Clearance Center that applies to all its employees and campuses. With this license, the University pays one yearly fee for blanket copyright permissions for thousands of publications. As long as a publication (e.g. a book or journal) is covered under the Annual Copyright License, faculty and staff can reproduce material from that publication for class handouts, posting in courses on Blackboard, emailing to students or other faculty, and more.

This video shows you how to check whether copyrighted works are covered under this license for use in your courses.

Are You Being Copyright Compliant? - check this flow chart before you share, post, email, or copy material.

The USA Library provides a handout for faculty and staff members with instructions for checking our copyright permissions. It is each faculty/staff member's responsibility to check for copyright permission before sharing/copying/posting material. Essentially, you must first create a RightFind Academic account with your USA email address. If you are on campus, the site may recognize automatically that you are affiliated with USA. In that case, you do not need to create an account. Then, you can search for publications to see their status under the Annual Copyright License.

Though most content will be covered, occasionally you may find that a book chapter or journal article you want to use is not covered. In these cases, you may have several options for sharing that content with your students and/or colleagues:

The Annual Copyright License is a product through the Copyright Clearance Center, a third party company that acts as a go-between for institutions (like universities) and publishers to make copyright compliance easier. The Copyright Clearance Center attempts to work with as many publishers as possible, but it is, of course, at the publisher's discretion. Typically, if a publication is not covered under the Annual Copyright License, it is because the publisher does not work with Copyright Clearance Center, or does not want to grant permission in that way. The Copyright Clearance Center constantly adds publishers, so publications that are not covered now may be covered in the future.

No. The Annual Copyright License is exclusive to text-based materials. If you would like to post an image in Blackboard for a course or put it in a course packet, you must get permission from the copyright holder. Images found through a Google image search (or something similar) are still copyright protected and cannot legally be copied/saved without permission.

Some images found online might be public domain or use a Creative Commons license, but unless you see a statement to that fact, you should assume the image is copyrighted. An easy way to find public domain/Creative Commons images is through a Google Advanced Image search. Enter your search terms and then select "free to use or share, even commercially" under usage rights. Keep in mind that Creative Commons licensed material is not the same as public domain and you must adhere to the conditions set forth in the Creative Commons license for that material. Other sources of public domain/Creative Commons images are the NIH Image Bank and Wikimedia Commons.

USA faculty and staff have permission to reuse images from eBooks in the library's R2 Digital Library collection as a part of our purchase agreement for those titles. Feel free to use those images, but make sure you cite the images appropriately.

Copyright law relating to videos limits our ability to show a video in public (outside of a private home). Showing a video in a classroom setting (particularly a classroom in a for-profit university) requires permission from the copyright holder in most cases. Most of the videos we use here at USA are produced and created by USA employees, which means that the University is the copyright holder. Showing USA produced videos in class is not a problem, but be sure to get permission if you wish to show any other video in class.

For additional permissions for images and videos, contact your program director.

Our annual copyright license covers text only, but if you use an image in the context of the text around it on the page in the article or chapter, you do not need to request additional permissions, as long as the journal article/book is covered under our annual copyright license. If you use the image only (not within its textual context), then you must get permission to use the image.

I always cite the source of an image, text, etc. in my presentations and handouts, so I don't need to do anything else, right?

  

Can I use an article I got free online without checking for or requesting copyright permission?
No. Journals that are open access provide the full text of their articles free online. But just because the publishers share the full text for free, it doesn't mean they're giving permission for everyone to share the full text for free. Some open access publishers say specifically on their website that they do give general permission for others to share and copy their articles, but most do not. If the journal is covered under our Annual Copyright License, you can post the full text. If it is not, the best thing to do is share the link to the article instead of the full text article itself.

What's the difference between open access and public domain?

The difference between open access and public domain has to do with copyright ownership. Public domain means that nobody owns the copyright, so members of the public are free to copy and share the content without asking permission. Material freely available online, including open access journal articles, images, website content, etc., is not necessarily public domain. Copyright holders do not cede their copyright ownership when they post their materials online. By law, the copyright holder has the right to share (or distribute) a work for free online if they want to. Users who visit the site and do not own the copyright do not have the right to make copies of the material available by printing multiple copies, emailing a copy to multiple people, or posting the content on another site where multiple people can access it. The bottom line is that just because a work is available for free online does not mean we are free to do with it whatever we wish. If we do wish to share an open access material with multiple people, the best thing to do is to share the link to that material.

Do I need to check for copyright permission to use an article or book chapter I authored?

Is it okay for me to do this...?