The author is usually the owner... (optional)

• Except when work-for-hire rules apply (optional further reading). The author's employer owns work(s):

  • Created by an employee within the scope of employment, or

  • That fall within one or more of the nine statutory categories, where an agreement commissioning the work is in writing and signed by the creator or creators before work begins.

    • The nine statutory categories include: contribution to a collective work; part of a movie or other audiovisual work; a translation; a supplementary work; a compilation; an instructional text; a test; answer material for a test; or an atlas.

• If a work doesn't fit within the statutory definition of a work-for-hire, the employer may still own it if the author assigns the copyright to the employer or contractor.

• An author-owner is free to assign copyright to anyone, so a written contract can change these basic rules.

  • Many publishers require assignment of copyright as a condition of publication.

The Copyright Act (optional) gives all authors a set of rights that only they may exercise. These include the right to make copies, to prepare derivative works, to publicly distribute, display and perform the work, and in the case of digital sound recordings, to perform the works over a digital network.

With this short set of rights, you would have near perfect control over your works; in fact, too perfect a control. So, the law provides some breathing room so the public can benefit from the increased numbers of works that are the goal of the law. To use those works, the public enjoys rights to display their own copies, to lend them or give them away, even to sell them, and to reproduce parts of the works in certain circumstances, even to reproduce the entire work in some cases, as a fair use. For more information about fair use, read fair use of copyrighted materials (optional).

Your rights go on for your entire lifetime, plus 70 more years.

You may not need to worry about copyright at all! Many works are not protected, or are already licensed to you or your institution for the uses you wish to make.

Copyright does not protect, and anyone may freely use:

• Works that lack originality (optional)

  • Logical, comprehensive compilations (like the phone book)

  • Unoriginal reprints of public domain works

• Works in the public domain (optional)

• US Government works (optional)

• Facts

• Ideas, processes, methods, and systems described in copyrighted works (optional)

The presence or absence of a copyright notice no longer carries the significance it once did because the law no longer requires a notice. Older works published without a notice may be in the public domain, but for works created after March 1, 1989, absence of a notice means virtually nothing.

Lolly Gasaway and Peter Hirtle (both links optional reading) explain the rules for determining whether a protected work is in the public domain in two excellent resources (Hirtle, 2018). These rules are complex and somewhat hard to describe, partly because they changed many times during the 20th century. At their most basic, excluding anonymous works and works for hire, the rules can be summarized as follows:

• Any work published on or before December 31, 1922 is now in the public domain.

• Works published between January 1, 1923 and December 31, 1978, inclusive, are protected for a term of 95 years from the date of publication, with the proper notice.

  • But, if the work was published between 1923 and December 31, 1963, when there was a non-automatic "renewal term", the copyright owner may not have renewed the work. If he or she did not renew, the original term of protection (28 years) will have expired and the work will be in the public domain. Check the Stanford "Determinator" to determine renewal status for books published during these years (optional).

• After 1978, the way we measured the term of protection changed. It no longer begins on the date of publication, but rather it runs for 70 years from the date the author dies (called life of the author plus 70 years). Further, publication is irrelevant. Works are protected whether they are published or not.

• Finally, those works that were created before December 31, 1978, but never published, are now protected for the life of the author plus 70 years.

Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public licenses that enable the free distribution of what would otherwise be copyrighted work. In fact, Creative Commons is the most widely used license for OER’s.

Creative Commons is notated by a logo with two C’s inside a circle, called, “CC”.

A CC license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and/or build upon a work that they have created. Anyone who builds upon the license is asked to share it back to the learning community. Nothing with a CC license can be later copyrighted; it must remain open and in the public domain.

Learn to do effective Creative Commons searches (optional)! You may find exactly what you need with the rights you need to use it, available online for free.

Fair use is a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances.

There are many other excellent resources online providing guidance for the use of the four fair use factors. See, for example, Columbia University's Fair Use Checklist, UMUC's Copyright and Fair Use in the Classroom, University of Minnesota Libraries' Thinking Through Fair Use, and the many wonderful statements of fair use best practices published by or with the Center for Media and Social Impact, just to name a few (all optional).

These severe limitations on what could be performed in distance education received a lot of attention. In 1998, Congress directed the Copyright Office to prepare a report recommending what should be done to facilitate the use of digital technologies in distance education. The Copyright Office prepared its report and recommended significant changes. The TEACH Act became law in late 2002.

The TEACH Act expands the scope of educators' rights to perform and display works and to make the copies integral to such performances and displays for digital distance education, making the rights closer to those we have in face-to-face teaching. But there is still a considerable gap between what the statute authorizes for face-to-face teaching and for distance education. For example, as indicated above, an educator may show or perform any work related to the curriculum, regardless of the medium, face-to-face in the classroom - still images, music of every kind, even movies. There are no limits and no permission required. Under 110(2), however, even as revised and expanded, the same educator would have to pare down some of those materials to show them to distant students or make them available over the internet to face-to-face students. The audiovisual works and dramatic musical works may only be shown as clips -- "reasonable and limited portions," the Act says.

Section 110's role in the balance of interests has always been to permit educators to share works with their students, and to show others' works in class. In its exclusion of meaningful rights for digital distance educators, Section 110 was failing to carry its weight, so to speak. It had been, in effect, "written out" of the statute by being obsolete. Now, it has been expanded to permit educators to show materials the statute did not cover before; however, new Section 110(2) significantly limits who may display and perform how much of what materials, and under what circumstances.

The TEACH Act checklist, summarizes the 22 (!) prerequisites (optional).

Adler, P.S., Aufderheid, P., Butler, B., and Jaszi, P. (2012). Code of Best Practice in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries. Washington D.C.: American University. Retrieved from http://cmsimpact.org/code/code-best-practices-fair-use-academic-research-libraries/.

Harper, G. (2018). Copyright Crash Course. University of Texas Libraries. http://doi.org/10.15781/T24J09X6J. Retrieved from http://guides.lib.utexas.edu/copyright.

Hirtle, P. B. (2018). Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States. Cornell University Library. Retrieved from https://copyright.cornell.edu/publicdomain.