Copyright and print/text resources

Classroom distribution is allowed for photocopying of one chapter from a book, one article, or one poem without permission provided that the material has not been used before and the copyright information is included somewhere on the handout.

Only one copy per student is allowed, students cannot be charged any fee beyond photocopying costs, and the materials cannot be photocopied again for the same or another course without permission.

Workbooks and texts can never be reproduced without permission. Multiple reproductions of pamphlets, cartoons or illustrations must be approved by the rightsholder.

For single copying, no more than 25% of an entire work may be copied at any one time. 

Only 25% of a book can be photocopied at any one time for personal use. Successive copying of an entire book is allowable, provided that no more than 25% of the book exists at any one time.The remaining 75% must remain uncopied or the copied material must be destroyed immediately after use.

For a single photocopy, fair use allows copying of up to 25% of an entire work without securing permission. Ordering the book itself is always an option. Please see your librarian for details.

Permission for these requests should be secured before proceeding. The Disability Services Supplies Account can be used for charging duplicated work for the visually impaired. Please contact the director of Disability Services for details.

The hard copy of an e-book chapter may be printed and distributed to the class under first time fair use with no copyright clearance necessary. If the chapter is used again in another semester, copyright clearance must be secured. Alternately, make a link to the chapter in your Canvas course.

This is not the best idea. You have no way of controlling “downstream” uses and the practice may be considered distribution, a right reserved by the copyright holder. A better choice is to link to the article from Canvas.

Since the translation is copyrighted, you need to get copyright permission from the copyright holder of the translation to make changes to it, even if just to “smooth out” or update the language. The amount of altering does not make a difference. If the translation is difficult to understand and you want to make changes, you could offer your own paraphrased version in a footnote to the copyrighted text. Remember that you need to get permission from the translator to modify the translation - if you want to do a brand new translation, you would need to get permission from the original author/copyright holder.

Photocopying of a short story, poem, or newspaper/magazine article is allowed for classroom handouts without permission provided that students are charged nothing beyond the cost of photocopying and that the material will not be photocopied again for the same or another course.

Faculty are encouraged to direct students to materials in the databases the library already pays for.

However, any copyrighted material placed in a printed coursepack must have copyright clearance whether or not it is in the library databases.

While there is no clear answer in this instance, it can arguably be considered fair use, based on the 4 factors that determine fair use:

1. Market effect: This use will not have an effect on the market for this work (nobody’s using this copy as opposed to buying the whole essay.) Further, no financial gain will come of this
2. Purpose and character of the use: The purpose is educational and is for an exercise; the purpose not for people to keep, presumably. Educational fair use is not limited to classrooms per se, but also extends to educational conferences.
3. The nature of the work: A short essay.
4. Amount and substantiality of the portion taken: If the educator could use less than the entire essay, so much the better since, with fair use, guidelines call for using use a portion rather than the whole. But sometimes copying the whole has also been considered fair use and the whole, in this case, is very short. The "brevity" guideline of fair use does allow for a short essay.