Copyright@MSP

Copyright is a form of legal protection that allows authors, photographers, composers, and other creators to control some reproduction and distribution of their work.

There are several different rights that come along with copyright. In general, copyright holders have the exclusive right to do and to authorize others to do the following:

• Reproduce the work in whole or in part

• Prepare derivative works, such as translations, dramatizations, and musical arrangements

• Distribute copies of the work by sale, gift, rental, or loan

• Publicly perform the work

• Publicly display the work

These rights have exceptions and limitations, including the “fair use” provisions, which allow certain uses without permission of the copyright holder.

Adapted from the University of Michigan Library under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license.

Fair use allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder for purposes such as criticism, parody, news reporting, research and scholarship, and teaching. There are four factors to consider when determining whether your use is a fair one. You must consider all the factors below, even though all the factors do not have to be in favor of a use to make it a fair one.

The four fair use factors are as follows:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

2. The nature of the copyrighted work, such as whether the work is fiction or non-fiction, published or unpublished;

3. The amount of the work used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole, such as using a poem in its entirety, or using one chapter from a long book;

4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for the copyrighted work.

For assistance in analyzing these factors for individual cases, see this Fair Use Checklist.

Please note that just because your use is for non-profit educational purposes does not automatically give you permission to copy and distribute other people’s work. While many educational uses may be fair, you will probably need to evaluate your use each time you are reproducing copyrighted material — to show in your class, to hand out copies, or to include in your writing.

Adapted from Baylor University Libraries (https://www.baylor.edu/copyright/). Used with permission.

In general, the principle of fair use allows the inclusion of quotations and excerpts in scholarly work without seeking permission as long as you properly cite that content. The same fair use provisions that protect the use of quotations and excerpts in scholarly writing assignments and dissertations also protect those uses in scholarly presentations. In a face-to-face situation, you may include copyrighted text, images, or videos in your presentation slides as long as you include a statement of attribution. 

Doing a conference presentation that includes copyrighted content (e.g., illustrations or figures) may require additional due diligence if the organizers plan to reuse your presentation after it is over. For example, if video of your presentation will be posted on the conference website or if the slides will be made freely available for download, your ability to include that copyrighted content may be more limited. You can generally show more than you can share, and you should clarify these issues in advance so that you have time to clear rights for the copyrighted material in your presentation, create a second version for distribution that does not include the copyrighted material, or choose alternative material that you are free to use.

These same principles also apply to using charts, graphs, and testing instruments from copyrighted sources in your dissertation, particularly since MSP dissertations are deposited in ProQuest's Dissertations & Theses Global database. Because ProQuest is a publisher of MSP dissertations,  you do need to seek permission for reuse of copyrighted content in the published version of your dissertation.  Alternatively, you can remove that content from the final version of your dissertation.

Please be sure to consult ProQuest's own guidance by copyright expert Kenneth D. Crews here. When you have located the copyright holder for the content you wish to reuse, a sample letter for requesting reuse of this kind of content may be found here.  If you need further assistance with determining whether you have sought the proper permissions for reuse of copyrighted content, come talk to us in the library.  In some situations, it may be necessary to request permission from Copyright.com's Marketplace.

Adapted from Baylor University Libraries (https://www.baylor.edu/copyright/). Used with permission. 

The Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act of 2002 says that teachers and students at accredited educational institutions can use works for remote learning without permission under certain circumstances.

If you agree to:

• supervise your students’ use of copyrighted materials;

• use the material as an integral part of a class session and your curriculum;

• use technology that reasonably limits the students' ability to retain or further distribute the materials;

• not make copies of content to be shared with a class other than the one you are using to make the transmission;

• use only reasonable and limited parts of a dramatic literary, musical, or audiovisual work;

• not use technological measures to circumvent access controls to copyrighted works (e.g., screensharing of a video in DVD format)

then your use aligns with the TEACH Act.

Adapted from the University of Michigan Library under a Creative Commons (CC by 4.0) license. 

Kenneth Crews's ebook Copyright Law for Librarians and Educators: Creative Strategies and Practical Solutions may be accessed here.

Helpful websites:

• https://www.lib.umn.edu/services/copyright/use#variety

• https://acrl.libguides.com/scholcomm/toolkit/copyright

• https://pitt.libguides.com/copyright/fairuse

• https://fairuse.stanford.edu/

There are no copyright restrictions in the following situations:

• Showing a lawfully made DVD to a fully in-person class

• Showing licensed streaming video content to a class, no matter whether it’s in-person, hyflex, or online. “Licensed” means MSP has an active subscription to the resource (e.g., Psychotherapy.net, selected Alexander Street, Kanopy videos, etc.)

In addition, the TEACH Act permits showing a reasonable and limited portion of a film, no matter its format, in a hyflex or remote classroom setting.

Additional Information on Using Video Resources

File sharing is the process of distributing or providing access to files for others to download from the internet. Normally, applications such as Dropbox or Google Drive are more than adequate for the needs of our community. 

Please be aware that although file sharing using decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, such as BitTorrent or Gnutella, is not inherently illegal, you must own the copyright to the content you are sharing in this manner or otherwise be licensed to share it. 

If you need to upload or download large files for your classwork, please contact the Director of Information Technology & Campus Security for guidance.