Copyright: What instructors need to consider

To determine whether you can use something without violating copyright, you need to answer four questions. Keep in mind that all four answers are on a continuum. It all comes down to the strength of your argument. Please see the
U.S. Copyright Office’s page on fair use for more information.

The PANE Test

Nature
of work. What kind of content are you using? Is it more creative or more factual? Copying from a creative work—such as a novel—is more likely to be viewed as a violation of copyright than, say, copying from a factual work—such as a business report. Journal articles are considered a creative work because new information is being created.

Examples

1. You want to use a cartoon you found at gocomics.com to illustrate a concept during class.
   

   green here.
   

   red
   here.
   

   red
   here.
   

   red
   here, you’re at least in the pink.
   

   Before you delete all of your gocomics.com cartoons from your presentation, let’s do a little research. Gocomics.com has in their FAQ a
   page on educational use of their cartoons. In that FAQ, you’ll read that “you may use up to seven (7) cartoons per year at no costs (sic) as part of our fair use policy,” and that includes overheads—which tells you how long ago the content on this page was written.
   

   
   

2.               You want to make some chapters from a textbook available to your students as free, downloadable pdfs in your learning management system.

green here.

red
here. If you’re using just one chapter, you may be on safer ground, especially if that one chapter is just to help students get through the first week of classes while they wait for their textbook to arrive. See economic impact.

red
here.

red
here.

3.               You’re showing an entire TV show episode or movie from Netflix to your class via Zoom.

green here.

red
here.

red
here.

red
here. 

One option is to use just a small clip from the video. Another option is to work with your librarians to get a copy of the video that you can use in class. College libraries play under some different copyright rules. Our library video licenses come with permission to show the videos to classes. Your Netflix subscription does not.

The final say