What Can You Legally Use As a Student?
As a student, you may copy:
- materials for which you have the copyright holder's permission, either through a Creative Commons license or through written or spoken permission
- materials found in the public domain
- within the Fair Use exceptions in the Copyright Law
Fair Use allows you to make copies for yourself for the purposes of education, private study, research, review, criticism, parody, satire, or news reporting. Under Fair Use, you can copy and communicate in paper or digital format up to 10% of the work. For example:
- one chapter from a book
- one article from a journal issue
- one article or page from a newspaper issue
- one entry from a reference work (e.g. encyclopedia, dictionary)
Additionally, section § 110 of the Copyright Law allows you to perform or display a lawfully made copy of a work (videos, images, texts, songs, etc.) in the course of face-to-face teaching activities, or digital transmission of such works through online courses, when they are using the work for instructional purposes at a non-profit educational institution. An important point to remember is that these copyright exceptions only cover the performance or display of a work. If you need to copy the work (i.e. reproduce the work) you must obtain copyright permission. Columbia University Libraries provide a guide on how to contact and request permission from a copyright owner to use a copyrighted work.
All works copied must be legally obtained.
Here are some specific examples of how you can use copyright protected materials:
- You can include copyrighted materials in your assignments and presentations, provided you are including the work for research, private study, education, parody, satire, criticism, review and news reporting purposes, and acknowledge the author and source of the material. Follow the Guide to Citation Styles to properly cite the copyrighted materials included in your work.
- You can play a video/DVD (legal copy only) or project a streamed video in class.
- You can link to an online video in your presentation.
- You can display a work that is not your own for a presentation or discussion in class.
- You can make copies of work that is not your own for a presentation or discussion in class, but the handouts can only be given to students in your class.
- You can perform a play on the premises of the institution under the following conditions:
- it must be for educational or training purposes,
- it must not be for profit,
- it must take place before an audience consisting primarily of students of the educational institution, persons acting under its authority, or a person who is directly responsible for setting a curriculum for the educational institution, and
- it must not involve a 'motive of gain'.
An example is the performance of a play in a drama class.
- You can record your instructor’s lecture to watch later with your instructor's prior permission. Instructors are the copyright owners of their lecture notes, PowerPoint presentations and exams, and thus control what can be done with their course materials.
Here are some examples of what you cannot do:
- Requesting the Library to copy more than two chapters or 10% of a copyright protected work (books, journal issues, etc.) for you.
- Requesting via ILL for more than one article per issue without requesting copyright permission.
- Posting of copyright protected works to a publicly accessible website.
- Copying multiple short excerpts from the same copyright protected work.