Copyright & Fair Use

The "Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization" Act (2002) established some guidelines for the use of digital materials for educational purposes. The full text of the bill can be found on the US Copyright office's website.

Some key points to the bill are as follows:

Copyright law treats digital and nondigital copyright-protected works similarly; however, the use of digital resources in online education received special attention through the TEACH Act.

This act allows performance and display of copyrighted materials for distance education by accredited, non-profit educational institutions.

The TEACH Act allows:

• Instructors to use a variety of works in online learning.

• Participants to store, copy, and digitize certain copyrighted materials.

The TEACH Act requires:

• A participating educational institution be accredited and non-profit.

• The use must of copyrighted materials be part of mediated learning activities.

• The use of the materials be limited to a specific number of students enrolled in a specific class.

• The materials cannot be textbook materials, materials “typically purchased or acquired by students,” or works developed specifically for online uses.

• A notice of copyright on the online materials.

• That materials be protected behind passworded and secure sites.

What the TEACH Act does not allow:

• Free access to textbooks or other digital content provided under license from the author, publisher or other entity.

This is a partial list of the stipulations of the bill. We recommend reading it in its entirety for additional information.

If you have a question about an item's copyright status, you can search the Library of Congress's copyright database for items copyrighted in the USA.

The USA has copyright agreements with many other nations--copyright laws pertain to items published in these countries as well.

There are a number of sites that provide free use of materials, including images, sound files, and text.

Images

All of these sites allow unrestricted re-use of images (but see caution below):

Commercial image sites

• Freerange

• Unsplash

• Pixabay

• Wikimedia Commons (also a good site for archival audio and video)

• Pexels

Libraries and Museums

• New York Public Library

• US Library of Congress

• Smithsonian Institution (also audio and video resources)

• Art Institute of Chicago

• Paris Musées (text in French)

• Yale University Art Gallery

Audio

• ccMixter

• Looperman

Video

While showing videos in face-to-face classes is generally allowed under the TEACH act, showing them online is more complicated. The University of Florida has a good summary of the restrictions on showing films online.

Note that many popular video streaming services, such as Netflix, have protections in place for showing films in group synchronous settings, such as over Zoom.

• Kanopy Streaming

Classic and documentary films. UC Berkeley has a license for access by CalNet ID login.

• MediaBurn

Archival video, some with instructional material included, such as discussion questions or historical background

Text/Books

• The Internet Archive (includes video, audio, and images as well)

• Project Gutenberg

• Librivox (audiobooks of open-source texts)

Although the commercial sites that provide royalty- and fee-free images require contributors to adhere to copyright regulations, there are instances where contributors illegally upload copyrighted materials, claiming them to be their own. A recent case is with the site Unsplash, who is disavowing their responsibility to police these illegal uploads. The resulting lawsuit is being targeted at an end-user of one of the photos on their site.

Similarly, some copyright-free materials may not include model releases, meaning that if there is a recognizable person in the photo who has not released their image for public use, it could cause copyright disputes.

For absolute security, do some research if possible, or stick to images provided by non-profit/governmental sources, such as public libraries or museums.