Copyright Issues in Teaching with Technology

Printed Materials
When you purchase a book, you buy the cover, binding, and pages. You acquire the right to read the intellectual property the book contains, but your “ownership” is restricted to the physical book itself. Under the “first sale doctrine” described in Section 109, you have the right to resell the book, give it away, or otherwise dispose of it, but beyond that point your rights are rather limited. Further use of the content of books, periodicals, and other printed materials, including reproduction for distribution to students, must be governed by existing guidelines or the criteria for fair use.

Single copies for teaching or research. The Guidelines for Classroom Copying in Not-For-Profit Educational Institutions specify that single copies of the following may be made for the purposes of scholarly research or use in teaching or preparation to teach a class:

• A chapter from a book.
• An article from a periodical or newspaper.
• A short story, short essay or short poem, whether or not from a collective work.
• A chart, graph, diagram, drawing, cartoon, or picture from a book, periodical, or newspaper.

These guidelines extend to student research related to a course or their own scholarship. Note that in each instance the permissible use is in the singular. Multiple items from the same source would not be acceptable. The guidelines are also painfully vague. For example, do they permit professors to routinely make overhead transparencies from Dilbert or Foxtrot cartoons because they appear in different newspaper issues? The guidelines seem to imply permissible use, but this is not one we’d care to test in a court case.

Academic libraries are permitted to make single copies for patrons, both faculty and students, essentially according to the same restrictions, as long as the copies become the property of the user and are for the purposes of private study, scholarship, or research. Section 108 exempts libraries and their employees from liability for infringements committed on an unsupervised photocopier, as long as a copyright warning notice is displayed on or near the copier, and places liability for infringement directly on the patron whose reproductions exceed the boundaries of fair use.

Multiple copies for classroom use. Do you duplicate journal articles on the department copier and pass them out in your class? The guidelines permit the reproduction and distribution of copyrighted materials (no more than one copy per student in the course), as long as the tests of brevity and spontaneity and the cumulative effect test are met.

• The test of brevity places limits on the length of materials to be reproduced, such as 2,500 words for a complete article and one illustration per book or periodical issue. See the guidelines for limits on other publication types.
• The test of spontaneity requires that “the inspiration and decision to use the work and the moment of its use for maximum teaching effectiveness are so close in time that it would be unreasonable to expect a timely reply to a request for permission.” With contemporary technologies such as electronic mail and faxes available for seeking permission, these two events should be pretty close together. Also, since spontaneity is rarely measured in terms of semesters, this test effectively prohibits use of the same materials in subsequent academic terms without permission.
• The cumulative effect test requires that no more than one item may be copied from the same author, nor more than three from the same collective work or periodical volume, in the same academic term. Moreover, the guidelines set the maximum number of multiple copying activities, of any kind, for any single class in any single course term, at nine.

By now, you may have concluded that the classroom copying guidelines are quite restrictive. Unless a publication is fresh off the press and the tests of spontaneity and brevity can be met, you may find it more convenient to go through the permission process and have students pay the licensing fee in the form of a purchase price.

The information age and resulting explosion of knowledge have made it difficult for publishers to keep textbooks current. As a result, many faculty have turned to coursepacks as a means of providing up-to-date information to students, either supplementing or replacing textbooks. Coursepacks are compilations of readings that may include journal articles, book chapters, conference papers, and other publications, copyright-cleared and sold by bookstores or copy services. If you compile the list of publications you wish to include in a coursepack, the DWU Bookstore can help you obtain the appropriate clearances and compile the coursepack for sale to the students. The sale price will be determined by the licensing fees.

Before you go through the process of building a coursepack, make sure that the publications are not already online in full text, and free to the DWU community. McGovern Library subscribes to several services that provide full-text of publications to faculty and students.

Previous | Contents | Next