Copyright

TECHNOLOGY ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY - The Library Media Center follows the Center for Instruction, Technology & Innovation ACCEPTABLE-USE REGULATION AND AGREEMENT. This can be found on https://www.citiboces.org/

Copyright Law

Click on the link below to the United States Copyright Office web site for a .pdf file of "the complete" current copyright law or .pdfs for individual sections.

Learn about "Fair Use" and the "TEACH act," the sections of the law which most often pertain to education.

Copyright Law of the United States
Here is title 17 and related titles from the U. S. Copyright Office.

Copyright basics?

It is important to become familiar with Fair Use, the Teach Act, and Classroom Use Exception - in the main menu above under Copyright Law.

Here is an overview of copyright law itself without reading the entire .pdf above, here are some guiding points:

Copyright Term and The Public Domain
A guide to copyright duration created by Peter Hirtle at Cornell University, is a comprehensive and useful resource for researching a work's copyright status.

Copyright may be an issue when dealing with:

Journal articles, or excerpts from them
Books, or excerpts from them
Databases and electronic journals
Musical works, scores, lyrics, and sound recordings
Pictorial/graphic works, art, sculpture, photographs
Audiovisual works, motion pictures, videos, video games
Computer software

Copyright is probably not an issue when dealing with:

Your lecture notes
Your course reading lists
The tests you’ve created for your courses
Publications of the US Government
Published works for which copyright has expired or does not apply, i.e. works in the Public Domain

How do works get copyrighted?

Under U.S. law, works are protected by copyright automatically at the time of their creation as a final fixed product. Copyright does not start until the work is completed and not still being edited. The finished product can be in digital format. You are not required to put a copyright notice on the work (e.g. © FSCJ 2017), to register the work with the U.S. Copyright Office, or to publish the work.

Although providing a copyright notice is not legally required, it can be a good idea to include one anyway if you are making your work publicly available. A copyright notice should provide a way for people who want to use your work to contact you for permission.

You can also publish or self-publish with a Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC 4.0. this allows you to keep credit for your work and puts it out in the Public Domain. Look at CC BY-NC 4.0. for limitations you can put on your Creative Commons licence.

Who owns the copyright to a work?

In most cases, the author or creator of the work is the copyright holder unless they have transferred the rights to someone else through a written agreement, such as a publishing agreement.

If the work is created as part of a person's employment, it may be a "work for hire," meaning that the employer is the copyright holder. In the school setting, teacher created material for classes they teach are considered to be works for hire.

If two or more people together create a work, they are joint holders of the copyright. Joint owners each have an equal right to exercise and enforce the copyright.

This page derives content from:

Russell, Carrie. Complete Copyright for K-12 Librarians and Educators. American Library Association, 2012.

Simpson, Carol. Copyright for Schools: a Practical Guide. Linworth, 2010.

These books are available for loan from Ms. Cummings

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