LibGuides: Open Educational Resources: Copyright and Fair Use

Copyright Resources

Center for Media & Social Impact
They investigate, showcase and set standards for socially engaged media-making.
US Copyright Office
US Copyright Office's homepage that includes many resources including information on licensing and registration.

Fair Use Resources

Fair Use
An excellent explanation of Fair Use by Stanford University Libraries. It also includes a list of several music cases with explanations on the courts' decisions.
Fair Use Checklist
A useful tool from Columbia University Libraries that will help you begin your own assessment to see if your project can be considered fair use.
Fair Use Evaluator
Another helpful tool for you to evaluate "fairness" of the use of a copyright work. This tool is more interactive and will take you through a series of online forms and provide you with a color coded "fairness" result.

Fair(y) Use Tale

Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University provides this humorous, yet informative, review of copyright principles delivered through the words of the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms.

Thank you

Thank you to the Librarians at University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries for their help with this part of our LibGuide.

What is Copyright?

Do you ever wonder why:

iTunes charges you $1.29 per song?
videos in You Tube of recent episodes of The Walking Dead are quickly taken down?

Copyright is a federal law that gives creators of media the exclusive rights to copy, distribute, and mash up the things they create for a limited time. As you work on any assignment that includes digital media (e.g., images, video, or music) it is good practice to make sure you are abiding by copyright laws.

What is Fair Use?

Fair use is a doctrine of US Copyright Law, allowing for the limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the copyright holder. It permits legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another creator's work using a 4-part balancing test. The tricky part about Fair Use is that the balancing test is subjective and open to interpretation.

The four factors judges consider are:

purpose and character of your use
nature of the copyrighted work
amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and
effect of the use upon the potential market.

Source