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Library Contacts

Copyright & Fair Use: Donald Williams, Copyright & Scholarly Communications Manager, dgwilliams3@bsu.edu

Reading Lists & Course Reserves: Laura MacLeod Suman, Head of Access Services, lsuman@bsu.edu

OER & Open Licensing: Donald Williams, Copyright & Scholarly Communications Manager, dgwilliams3@bsu.edu, and Laura MacLeod Suman, Head of Access Services, lsuman@bsu.edu

Part One: Understanding Fair Use

One of the most important benefits of OER is the way that they facilitate course material access and distribution without the restrictions of traditional "all rights reserved" copyright. By using Creative Commons licensing structures, creators retain the copyright to their intellectual property but can specify precisely what uses of their materials they permit and encourage. This means that educators are not required to make fair use arguments or seek publisher permissions as they would for materials and media that enforce every aspect of copyright, as is the case with traditional publishers and media companies.

When it is beneficial to direct students to copyrighted content that is hosted online, the best practice is to link to that material directly rather than upload it into Canvas. When constructing a course, it's important not to become a distributor of copyrighted materials. These materials can be linked from a syllabus or course page, but can also be incorporated into library resources like Reading Lists.

In this module, we will discuss copyright considerations, fair use, the specifics of Creative Commons licenses, and best practices for providing no-cost access to copyrighted materials. In the following video, Donald Williams, Copyright and Scholarly Communications Manager, kicks off an introduction about copyright and fair use.

Part Two: Reviewing Fair Use

Fair use is flexible and broad, and the law does not offer any hard and fast rules to determine whether or not a given use is "fair." However, it does outline four factors as guideposts to help all of us evaluate the use of copyrighted materials on a case-by-case basis:

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

The first factor explores why and to what purpose the copyrighted work is being used. Does it "transform" the work by using it in a new context or for a new purpose other than the one for which it was originally created? Is it being used to meet scholarly or educational goals? While noncommercial uses tend to weigh in favor of fair use, courts have also determined commercial uses to be fair in some cases.
The nature of the copyrighted work.

Works that have already been published or publicly distributed are usually better candidates for fair use, as copyright holders have already exercised their exclusive right to make their works available. Also, remember that facts themselves cannot be copyrighted, so uses of heavily factual works might be considered fairer than uses of heavily creative works.
The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.

Some fair use guidelines try to recommend specific portions or percentages of a work that count as fair; however, it is important to remember that the law does not offer any absolute lower or upper limits. In general, using a smaller proportion of a work will bolster the argument for fair use, but there are times when the use of a larger portion or even an entire work is appropriate to the intended purpose.
The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Will your use of a copyrighted work deprive the rights holder of income or undermine sales of that work? Especially if it is feasible to purchase the work or to pay a copyright holder for its use, you should carefully consider whether the other three factors weigh in favor of fair use.

Remember that your use of copyrighted material may be fair even in cases where one or more of these factors leans against fair use if the other factors strongly favor it. The law makes each of us responsible for evaluating our own uses of copyrighted works.

Text from the BSU Libraries' Fair Use Research Guide

Part Three: Creative Commons and Open Licensing

Explore the individual Creative Commons licenses.

As we explore Open Educational Resources and "Open" in general, you may be wondering how this relates to Open Access scholarship. They are closely related, as they are similar and often identical materials shared using these CC licenses. Essentially, all OER is Open Access, but not all Open Access is OER. This primarily comes down to that "No Derivatives" license. Material is considered "Open" when it can be freely accessed, downloaded, and distributed without restriction. A crucial element of OER is that these resources allow for adaptation; you can take three chapters from one OER textbook, combine them with two chapters from another, and add your own introduction, making edits throughout the resulting document. So long as you acknowledge what information came from where, you can then upload that new text to Canvas or anywhere online without violating copyright.

In the following video, Donald Williams, Copyright and Scholarly Communications Manager, dives deeper into creative commons and open licensing.

One popular vocabulary for discussing "Open" material is the 5 R Activities structure; you can see here how Open Access and Open Educational Resources fit:

Screenshot 2022-05-06 170858.jpg — This material is an adaptation of Defining the "Open" in Open Content and Open Educational Resources, which was originally written by David Wiley and published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at http://opencontent.org/definition/

Creative Commons licenses provide the structure for most openly-licensed content online, including Open Access scholarship and OER, but also many popular multimedia sharing sites. You can use advanced searches on Google Images or YouTube to filter to CC-licensed results. "Creative Commons" refers to the licensing structure itself, but that "commons" can also be a resource where creators make their media available with permissive licenses. If you're interested in shaking up your lecture slides or an upcoming presentation, for example, you can sort through the following resources for media:

Photos & Audio - Openverse
Photos - Flickr Creative Commons
Video - Vimeo Creative Commons
Audio - ccmixter

Creative Commons Attributions

The main requirement of using CC-licensed materials is that you specify which content is being licensed and credit the original author of the intellectual property. These attributions function identically to academic citations. To make things easier, you can find Attribution Builders online.

Traditionally Copyrighted Material with Library Access

As you consider the construction of low- and no-cost courses, you can also consider using the traditionally copyrighted materials all BSU students and faculty have access to through the University Libraries databases. While copyright does not permit you to download closed copyrighted materials and then load them into Canvas, we do encourage you to embed links to scholarship.

To request the digitization of video resources by University Media Services, consult the Streaming Media Request Form.

Library Research Guides & External Resources