As the copyright owner of an online course, you may be combining “content” music, text, graphics, illustrations, articles, and photographs that are protected under copyright law. To operate within the law, you must avoid infringing upon copyrights owned by others and develop an understanding of your own rights. The Center for Distributed Learning identifies the university’s position regarding your ownership rights in its General Policies on Intellectual Property Rights.
Once a work is in a tangible form, it is considered copyrighted. The Copyright Act states that works of copyright ownership include the following:
Literary works (eg):
Unless explicitly stated otherwise, you must assume all materials found on the Internet are copyrighted even though it may not include a copyright notice. For this reason, you should not include anything found on the Internet without first getting permission from the copyright holder. (Caution: The copyright holder may not be the person displaying the work on their Web site!)
If you want to use it, ask permission!
When you include any content in an online course you are performing two actions:
These two rights belong to the copyright owner only. If you want to display, perform, or distribute something copyrighted, the safest course is to obtain permission (in writing) from the owner. Obtaining permission may entail paying a fee for use of a work.
When it is not possible to obtain permission, do not use any copyrighted materials unless the use of that portion of the work weighs heavily in favor of the Fair Use Doctrine or other recognized guidelines.
The Fair Use doctrine is a provision of copyright law designed to allow the limited use of copyrighted work without the permission of the copyright owner. It was developed with education in mind and is specifically applicable to teaching, research, scholarship, comment, criticism, or news reporting in face-to-face situations. When specific guidelines are not provided in the law, the general concept of Fair Use comes into play. For the proper use of copyrighted works, refer to the general law of fair use or the applicable statute that applies to distance education and educational situations, Section 110(2) of the U.S. Copyright Act. This statute has recently been revised by the TEACH Act.
How can I determine if Fair Use applies?
The following specific factors must be considered in each instance to determine if Fair Use applies.
Each of the four factors must be applied and weighed together to make a case for Fair Use.
The Fair Use statute is ambiguous by design. Each of the above four factors must be considered in light of copyrighted work to help reach a responsible conclusion about Fair Use. Even though the Four Factor Use Test is codified in Section 107, Title 17, U.S.C (Copyright Act), it does not provide all the guidance that might be necessary in properly applying the concept of Fair Use. Some of the explanations/elaborations on Fair Use will help in providing additional guidance.